Open The Dialogue

Brian Solis has released version 2.0 of his popular Conversation Prism. Created in a collaboration between Solis and uber-designer Jesse Thomas, the Conversation prism maps virtually all reaches of the online conversational universe.

Expanding on previous versions of the representation, Solis sought to, “observe, analyze, dissect, and present the dynamics of conversations, how and where they transpired.”

Solis writes:

Conversations are increasingly distributed. This social distribution fragments our ability to connect with masses, but promotes a 1:1 approach that yields a one-to-many upside through the empowerment of influential social beacons.

The Conversation Prism represents that opportunity to proactively survey the landscape to pinpoint relevant dialogue, prioritize participation strategies, and create an engagement hierarchy and org chart.

V2.0 introduces a workflow rotation of concentric circles that assist in the establishment of value-added engagement cadence.

Don’t underestimate the scope or importance of this representation. This is significant.

Journalism as we know it is undergoing some serious changes.  Alarm bells have been ringing with the closing of multiple newspapers nationwide while others have gone all-digital.  Readership of newspapers has been in free-fall which has precipitated an even worse free-fall of ad revenue.  As the death spiral continues, the prognosis of traditional journalism is less than bleak.  Here’s a piece by CBS News this past Sunday:

The piece certainly seems to show the industry in a state of panic.  While newspapers may be on its deathbed, journalism itself is an essential component to our society.  The availability of truthful information is crucial to a healthy democracy, economy and security.  That much is certain from the experience of the last few years.

Advice for newspapers on ways to weather this storm have been aplenty.  Some traditional outlets are trying out new business models to stay afloat.  U.K.’s The Guardian is trying out a different model while the Huffington Post will announce tomorrow of creating a fund to fill the gap of investigative journalism left by traditional presses.  At the same time, Tech Crunch is reporting that online journalists are feeling good about future prospects.

Journalism as we know is dead or soon will be, so long live the new journalism that is poised to take its place

I had the pleasure of meeting Katja Presnal, mommyblogger and PR and Social Media Consultant, at a Tweet-up in New York City last fall. She is speaks regularly about reaching the mommy target market and she currently is one of Walmart’s Elevenmoms. Katja has shared some wonderful insights with me about mommybloggers and she was kind enough to share some of her thoughts with the readers of Open the Dialogue. You can read more about Katja at her blog, Skimbaco Lifestyle. – AB

Defining Modern Mom

Marketing to moms is one of the hottest online marketing niches at the moment. According to BSM Media, moms spend $2.1 trillion a year, and modern mom doesn’t just buy diapers and cleaning supplies, but makes the purchasing decision of everything from cars to electronics. The number of work-at-home-moms and mompreneurs keeps just increasing, and today’s mom is also business savvy, and the most likely target market to do online research and hear the opinion of her friends and other moms that she trusts before making a purchasing decision.

You can find today’s mom blogging, tweeting, skyping and kirtsying her opinions, experiences and product finds with other moms. Moms tend to trust other moms’ opinion much more than a message they hear from TV or print media, and this is why word-of-mouth marketing and marketing with moms is the most effective way to get your message to moms.

Know your target market

There are so many niches within the mom target market. Get to know what kind of mom uses the product you are trying to market, and find mommy bloggers in that niche. Don’t think mom is a mom – there are so many sub-cultures and different types of moms, and you need to find the right ones that fit your product and brand.

Do your research. Get to know who these women are and build an on-going relationship with the mommy bloggers – if they are able to market one of your products/clients/brands well, they are likely to be a great person to partner later on too. Organize your mommy blogger contacts in different niches to make it easy to contact the right ones when you have a new client.

Think what you have to offer for the mommy bloggers

While there are thousands of new mommy blogs popping out weekly, and you will most likely to get some mommy blogger to post a review of your product with a poor pitch and without offering anything for them, blogging is a business for many of the successful mommy bloggers. I always say to all of my PR clients, think what you can do to mommy bloggers, not what they can do for you, and that is the first step to a successful relationship.

Don’t expect a product review without sending a product to review. Most mommy bloggers pride themselves giving honest product reviews, and how could they honestly write their opinion, if they haven’t even seen the product? And while print and TV media normally return your samples, think that journalists are being paid a salary to do reviews and write articles – mommy bloggers are not.

To truly engage with mommy bloggers, tell them about your brand, and engage them in the discussion, many times you will get the best marketing ideas from them – after all, they know the target market. Offer the mommy bloggers an unique experience or sponsor one to a blogging conference and go to the conference with the mommy blogger and learn more from her, how she sees the relationship between PR people and mommy bloggers can develop to better and be mutually beneficial.

Real Life Examples

Follow how brands are marketing with moms successfully and learn from others. Walmart’s Elevenmoms campaign is a great example of authentic engagement with a number of mommy bloggers. Disney has been very successful with their Mom Panel and by inviting real moms to visit their parks to hear moms’ opinions on the experience and at the same time Disney has received positive PR from the moms sharing the experience with others online. Frito-Lay and Suave has invited moms to participate in their own red carpet evens in LA. Frito-Lay also invited moms to visit their factory and so did Campbell’s telling bloggers about their brands and products.

When companies offer experiences like this to influential mommy bloggers, who are the “to-go moms” for their peer moms, and when they have a positive experience with your brand, they will become brand evangelists for life, and will keep promoting your brand over and over again.

Suggested reading:

Mom 3.0: Marketing WITH Today’s Mothers by Leveraging New Media & Technology by Maria T. Bailey.

- Katja Presnal

We call it critical mass, that point where the rumblings of niche followings, underground communities and cult-like worship overflows into a groundswell of mainstream attention. Unless you’ve been vacationing Grenyarnia for the past six months, you’ve probably noticed a near omnipresence of the microblogging, social networking amalgamation Twitter.

From CNN’s Rick Sanchez tweeting his way through CNN Newsroom every weekday to interviews with Twitter founders in virtually every major publication known to man (give-or-take), Twitter might now be everywhere, it didn’t come from out of nowhere.

Twitter’s history is actually quite a short one. Founded just three years ago this past weekend, Twitter has done much to change the face of technology and media. And while many have waxed knowledgeable of Twitter’s business model plans, some have simply offered up ideas for business models and one has even created a business model, but there’s really only one question that public relations (that’s a “royal we”) should have its sights set on. It’s a simple enough query, one you’ve probably already considered. The question, of course, is, “How will this benefit my client?”

It’s a question that is best answered first with another question, what the hell does Twitter do? The short answer is very little, but as with all cultural phenomenons the fact of the matter is a good deal more complicated — a fact that I stupidly overlooked way back in 2007 when I wrote a comparison between Twitter and the Google-acquired, now-defunct Dodgeball (which has now resurfaced, in a way, as FourSquare).

For its part, Twitter represents an ever growing mass of streams of consciousness. At any given point, the collective consciousness produces so much noise, that sometimes it’s difficult to parse from it any meaningful signal. The problem to our craft is that those signals, when focused, can resonate in increasingly powerful ways. It has become a hive mind of consumerism, an incubator of concepts and focal point through which culture and society are magnified.

My concern is that many of our industry friends are failing to leverage the medium effectively or neglecting the signal altogether. There are probably 1,000 reasons regarding why you, your agency or your client might be opting for the route of avoidance, but, returning to the facts, none of them are particularly good.

So, with that in mind, DialogueMedia will be offering up a series of tips through Open the Dialogue to help you help yourselves on Twitter. Stay tuned for the first installment, where we teach you the merits of PeopleBrowsr.

Last week, Nielsen Online released an authoritative look at the state of affairs of digital communication in a number of important countries worldwide.  This report was picked up by many influential blogs such as Mashable and RotorBlog.  DialogueMedia also chimed in on Open the Dialogue to bring a more nuanced understanding of the issues involved.

The report’s findings include:

• Social networking grew twice as fast as email.
• Social networking has greater reach than email.
• Total time spent on Facebook grew by 566% over the previous year versus only 18% for “all internet” and 63% for member communities.
• Social media’s highest growth came from the over 35 years old demographics.

Differences Between Email And Social Networks

The report clearly shows that the tools that are available to us for communication are constantly changing.  Arnold Zafra speculated that social networks would replace email on a RotorBlogpost titled “Is the Death of Email Upon Us?” while DialogueMedia’s post titled “Do Social Networks and Email Serve the Same Purpose?” argues that email and social networks serve distinct purposes.  The crux of the argument is that when used correctly, emails offer confidentiality, familiarity and a sense of importance to the reader in relation to other forms of digital communication.  Social networks are more public and therefore more impersonal.  Emails messages have to meet the needs of both the sender and the recipient; otherwise if it is useless to the reader it falls under the category of “spam”.  In social networks, the writer’s needs are met all the time, with some readers needs being met while other reader’s information needs are not.

What does this mean for PR and Marketing?

The report and reactions are especially important for PR and marketers as a taste of things to come.  As more and more newspapers close their doors or go all-digital, and reporters rely more and more on social networking services such as Twitter for pitches and scoops, the growing importance of social media as a tool for communications cannot be over emphasized.  At the same time, email is not dead; it will continue to have relevance. Social networking is not going to replace email, but rather social networking is an important complement to email.   

As PR professionals, adapting to this new environment will be our most important challenge. We need to use email as a tool who are keenly interested in what you have to say and use social networking as a way to “strengthen loose ties.”   Connections are our business and  both tools are already neccesary assets that should not be overlooked.

Co-written by: Nazim Uddin and Alex Payne