Open The Dialogue

We talk a lot about strategy here on OTD.  How marketing communications and PR work in the setting of a digital world.  We hope that this discussion helps you every single day.

However, nothing great in this world exists without fantastic execution.  When I came across this post from Tim Ferriss last week, I immediately wanted to call attention to it here.  Who are Tim and Ramit and why do they matter for this post?  Tim provides some information on what they both have a background in:

1) Building highly-trafficked blogs in a crowded blogosphere of more than 120 million blogs. More important, both of our blogs are well-known for action-oriented readers (For data on this blog’s readers — that’s you! — check this out).

2) Publishing books that reached The New York Times bestseller lists. Ramit’s experience is fresh and most up-to-date from his last three weeks with I Will Teach You To Be Rich, while I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek, which has been on the New York Times business bestseller list continually for 23 months, since its publication in April of 2007.

Tim sits down with Ramit Sethi and they have an in-depth discussion about the tactical efforts and experiences they’ve both had while writing on the web (and off it).  One of the best videos from the series is where they talk about how to get more readers and build traffic.

There are lots of different ways this question could be answered but I’m especially fond of their approach.  It centers around value and attention.  If you’re trying to get an audience on the web to give you their time, what are you giving them in return?  This is an important lesson to keep in mind while planning campaigns for your clients but, more importantly, when you’re executing them.   The video and some call-out points on my behalf below:

• Common misconception:  that you need a lot of readers.  What’s really important are the type of readers you get.  Ideally, your blog should be a vibrant and passionate community with a positive, engaged evironment.  Without that solid base, no matter how many people it is – whatever you try to build on, won’t be as good.

• You always need to connect what you’re doing online with what’s happening in your world offline.  People exist and communicate in both planes and helping them connect the two is extremely valuable.

• Content is king – what you need to create should be world-class and strive to be the default, definitive resource on that topic on the web.

• For both, their most popular content came much longer before they began focusing on keywords, SEO and technical prowness of being a “problogger.”    Simple calcuation:  time + passion=results.

• They mention personal favorite Andrew Chen as being a great example of someone who doesn’t have a huge audience but is super-influential because of the value he provides.

If you haven’t already, I’d take time out to watch as many of these videos as you can (Ramit collects all the videos here).  They’re real-world, practical advice that you can act on when it’s your turn to start building something meaningful on the web.

Melanie Notkin is a relative newcomer to the social media space but has already made an impressive name for herself as the founder and CEO of Savvy Auntie, an online community and web magazine for “Aunties by Relation (ABR), Aunties by Choice (ABC), Mommy Aunties, Great Aunts, Godmothers, and all women who love kids.” Melanie has made appearances at Mashable’s Social Media Hub: New York and NextWeb and and been featured in the New York Times, the Huffington Post and the Washington Post. Besides the Savvy Auntie community, you can connect with Melanie on Twitter and on Facebook. – AB

DM: What inspired you to start Savvy Auntie?
MN: I was a senior level beauty executive, traveling to Paris for work, meeting with the CEO often, and winning awards. I was a savvy, New York City executive. But when it came to the most valuable part of my life, my nephew and nieces, I didn’t know my Dora from my Bob the Builder. I was not a Savvy Auntie.

I felt it was time to develop the first online community for aunts so they could become Savvy Aunties. SavvyAuntie.com has become like a parenting guide for non-parents. It a modern resource for the cosmopolitan aunt.

You became a social media sensation since the launch of your website. What do you think have been your most successful social media tactics?
First of all, thank you. I appreciate the compliment and am honored. I think the first think to admit is that I didn’t really think of social media as a ‘tactic’ at all. Rather, I woke up one day with the decision to be an ‘auntrepreneur,’ and was rather desperate to gather as much information as I could. I started following tech and social media blogs in the summer of 2007, and heard about Twitter. I joined, dipped my toe in, and realized that the access I had to brilliant industry experts was invaluable. I was learning a lot. And the more I learned, the more I was able to share… and I also shared my story….of how I was launching my business…which inspired me to launch a blog about my auntrepreneurial journey. Listen, add value, repeat.

My presence in social media has always been authentic. I’ve shared the highs and the lows and everything in the between. Keeping it real, which is authentic to my brand and to my personality, is what I believe has helped me gather a wonderful group of followers.

You have worked with many PR professionals as editor of Savvy Auntie. What have been some best and worst moments?

Every moment is a thrill. I mean a year ago, I was praying I’d be on your radar. So every PR inquiry is a good thing.

Of course, when the inquiry or pitch is off topic, it’s a waste of my time.

On a few occasions, I’ve been called “Dear Mom” which is bad on a number of levels: The point of my site is for the non-mom; I’m not a mom; I wish I were a mom; time wasted.

I also have really bad visceral reaction to the word ‘blogger’ and ‘blog’ as it refers to me and to SavvyAuntie.com. Savvy Auntie is an online community. It’s not a blog. I’m Founder or Editor in Chief, not a “blogger.” Why must we ‘dumb-down’ ourselves by calling all online media “blogs?”

The other thing Savvy Auntie is not is a review blog. I don’t review anything. So don’t pitch me to review your product. Yes – I want to know about the latest gifts and trends for kids. That’s good! But I don’t know want to know about great maternity wear or home décor.

Also – I’m pretty cosmopolitan, so pitching me the opportunity to meet with a “celebrity” when the product is off topic, still won’t get me to go to the event.

Great pitches are ones that add value to my readers. Not to me.

Were you involved in social media before you started Savvy Auntie? How did you get started?
My entrée to Facebook was in May of 2007. My first tweet was in August of 2007. That summer and since, I began reading social media blogs (Mashable, Jeremiah Owyang’s blog, etc) to get up to speed. I spent a lot of time reading books like The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott. Then I read his blog and followed him on Twitter… and so on…

As a woman in business and in social media, what tips do you have for other women in an otherwise heavily-male influenced industry?
Think of it as an advantage, not a disadvantage. You stand out in a crowd. Plus, women inherently do better in social media because we are more social. Leverage your inner Socialite.

Graduation day is forthcoming for many public relations students. What is one lesson or piece of advice about public relations that Professor Notkin would like to impart?

Listen. Never stop listening. When you stop listening, you stop learning. And when you stop learning, you fail. Your education is just beginning… that’s why they call it a “commencement.”

What three blogs do you recommend to someone just getting started in social media?
Sorry –can’t stop at just three….. it was hard to stop at 7!

Mashable, Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategist, Chris Brogan’s blog, Going Social Now, Citizen Marketer 2.1, The Social Media Marketing Blog, and What’s Next.

Whether you’ve been on Twitter since 2006 or your name is Oprah, you may have seen this thing called a hashtag on  people’s posts.  Hashtags are those little phrases in a post preceded by a #. Many things have been hastagged from Shaq’s diet (#shaqlyte) to your favorite TV show (#24, #idol, #lost) to the Conservative movement on Twitter (#tcot).  But none of these help answer the question, why use hashtags?

The answer used to be simple: hashtags make it easier to search twitter for topics. Now however, Search.Twitter.com is so effective that results can not only be found by keyword, but  by proximity to a certain location, by attitude, by date, or even by person.  With this level of scale, the search function of hash-tag has been severely diminished.

But hashtags still have a relevant place in the Twitter community for three reasons:

1. Focus- Having and promoting a single hashtag for your company, event, or meme allows other Twitterers to focus on one thing when talking.  By fashioning the conversation around one specific point, everyone can easily focus on your message and not just your name.
2. Community- Hashtags create communities. #Followfriday (one of the most popular recurring Twitter memes) would mean nothing if it was a group of random people telling everyone who they should follow.  And no one would like that.
3. Visibility- Hashtags are a great way to make a subject more visible through searches and updates.  It’s like trying to start the wave at a big game.  If one or two people across the stadium try, there is no noticeable effect. But when a larger group of fans jump out of their seats at the same time, everyone better be ready to scream.

What are other reasons to use hashtags?  What are some of the ones you use?

Courtesy of Cory, this is a great video that almost everyone should watch – not just if you’re in the marketing communications/PR industry.  Seth talks about how much of modern life is “broken,” containing unnecessary steps and missing critical points or processes.  While he covers wonderful examples about how to avoid this in your life, why does it matter for PR?

Lots of times, while brainstorming campaign ideas, it might be attractive to think of extra steps or elements to differentiate yourself in a noisy sector or from a similar competitor.  Sometimes this is important, but lots of times it isn’t.

Resist the temptation to overcomplicate how you want to reach someone.  Be smart about it, be effective when talking to your audience and – most importantly – don’t add extra steps for someone to do just so it makes your client look good.  That seems counterintuitive to a whole effort behind communicating well and I’m sure Seth would agree.

Steve Lohr at the NY Times wrote a nice concise piece outlining the Sun/Oracle merger announcement this morning. I was going to write a short blurb on what this means for the technology sector and how HP and IBM now have a true third competitor in the enterprise level hardware/software/solutions space. Furthermore I was thinking I would try and talk about a $10 a share offer versus a $9.50 or what this may mean: “The combined company, according to Oracle and Sun executives, will be able tweak and integrate its software to reduce costs and bugs, and to tighten security. Sun’s computer designers, they said, can tailor hardware to the combined company’s software, promising further gains in efficiency.”

However, I think the most interesting part of the story right now is in the comments section of Lohr story. As of 8:50 am ET there’s over 50 comments (with recommendations on nearly all) talking about this merger, jobs, the future of MySQL, Larry Ellison’s empire, Open Source vs. operating systems, Java opportunities, Et cetera. Check out the comments section for yourself, large scale news clearly attracts reader response, but merger talks drive the conversation into 5th gear. That said, I went to the Sun (a former client) and Oracle website to see how they were addressing/communicating this major news with customers, partners, employees and the industry. Oracle has a dedicated page on the site that’s easy to find and flush with official statements/safe harbor statements in pdf format; here’s the Q&A and here’s a presentation on what the merger means for customers/partners. I didn’t see any social community engagement, perhaps I could visit the Sun website for that kind of engagement. Sun’s site also had the news front and center with a link to the press release and their engaging newsroom. From the newsroom on Sun’s site I could access Jonathan Schwartz’s blog which didn’t address the merger (in fact none of the company blogs did); their Twitter linked to the press release, Facebook didn’t say anything (but they do have nearly 10,000 fans), they didn’t have anything on their Second Life page or on the YouTube channel or anything easy to find on their many forums/discussion boards. Clearly Sun has some very engaging and cool social media programs (and I’m sure Oracle does somewhere as well) but I think this is a big miss by both these companies and other brands who announce mergers on the same day as Sun/Oracle (GSK & Stiefel).

Communicating at the individualized mass level, via digital networks, is of critical importance at this time for these two companies; not only for their investor messages or customer messages but for the industry, products and people for whom they have a responsibility. I don’t blame Oracle or Sun, I know very well how busy a merger can be for communications professionals , but I think we can take a lesson here for the future on how to integrate social media into your merger communications plan. Furthermore, leveraging social media as a function to not only share this news but to communicate what it means for the many different groups who are impacted (i.e., in this case MySQL, Java, open source, et cetra) would be prudent and a better function for their many different Facebook/Twitter/forum assets already in place.

Larry King must have thought the whole thing was a joke.  In his YouTube response to Ashton Kutcher’s 1,000,000 follower challenge “Do you think you can take on an entire network? Do you know how big we are? Do you what CNN is?”

Larry, your question has been answered. CNN is traditional (or old) media.  Ashton is new media, and new media won.

CNN did not begin this battle empty-handed or alone. CNN had on-air reporters like Anderson Cooper and Erica Hill asking for followers. The CNN ticker gave updates of the race and broadcasted their Twitter handle to the masses. CNN even reached into its pocketbooks and purchased @cnnbrk to help its race.  Ashton on the other hand, only had ustream.tv, YouTube, and his followers yet he still won.

Why? Ashton won because he had a group of savvy, die-hard fans willing to promote his videos and his goals.  He won because he had the blogosphere buzzing about the gauntlet he had thrown down at CNN  He won because he took a silly event like gaining extra followers and made it into something worth caring about. And he won because he understood social media and in the end knew that it was about his fans 

This was a simple silly competition that CNN should have easily won. They had a trusted, 24-hour network to supply coverage, one of the most familiar faces in news, and multiple places to reach their huge audience. But because they didn’t own their brand on Twitter (@cnnbrk), because they didn’t interact with their brand evangelists, and because they didn’t understand the way the game is played, they lost.

Ashton versus CNN was a silly little game but the implications are much larger. Social media has flexed its muscle and shown that it’s here to stay, even against traditional media.  This loss shows that brands, even megabrands like CNN, cannot treat social media lightly any longer. They have to start listening to their consumers online and interacting in a new way.  Otherwise a newer, more agile brand will come in and present a challenge they cannot afford to lose.

A few days ago, a student and researcher at The Ohio State University announced a pilot study indicating that there is a link to Facebook users in college and lower GPAs. 

This topic has sparked some interesting conversation, not only about Facebook, but our habit of multitasking in general.

Frankly, I don’t buy it and here’s why:

1. The study surveyed 219 students – this is hardly enough to call an accurate and representative sample especially when there are more than 200 million active users on Facebook. While I realize that this may just be a start to their research or a pilot, they should really take a look at a larger sample to come to a conclusion rather than the .0001095 percent that was included in the study.
2. No one I knew in college spent ALL day on Facebook. The study states that those using Facebook are studying an average of 1-5 hours a week versus those non-users studying 11-15 hours a week. Now, is it just me or would those students be studying the same amount of time even without a Facebook account? There are a number of other activities including sports, socializing, video games, etc. that could be impacting a student’s “study time” besides their Facebook account.
3. Another element ignored by this study is timing. How long do you have to use Facebook until your GPA becomes “affected?” Are you safe if you’ve only been using it for a month and then cease all use or will you as well be doomed into the categorization having a poor GPA due to your Facebook account? Now that would be an interesting study.
4. I don’t buy that Facebook is the only social network to “harm a student’s GPA.” Have we looked at twitter? Friendfeed? Or LinkedIn? Are those affecting the college student’s ability to have a high GPA?

The foundation of this study and the argument it makes overall is weak.  People use social networks in their daily lives, not just in college and this trend continues to grow. This makes the idea of social networking as a whole more relevant than ever before – regardless of your age.  Of course, it takes time to build your social network online – just as it does to hold an in-person meeting with those in your “offline” network. 

Overall, I think it comes down to the fact that students are yes, spending time on Facebook, but I don’t think you can accurately make the argument that it is contributing to poor grades. If a student has the will to succeed, they will and Facebook isn’t going to stop them.

Here are a few other great posts that offer thoughts on the recent Ohio State University findings:

• Blisstree.com
• Wired’s Epicenter
• College-StartUp.com

While Twitter basks in the glow of a huge, front-page NYT Biz section article – are the villagers gathering, getting ready to “storm the castle”?  John Brissenden points to an interesting post by Andrew Davis @ TippingPoint Labs about Tumblr being the heir-apparent to all the buzz that got Twitter rolling off your parent’s tounges in the first place.  

Mmmm, hockey sticks!

1. A quick search on Google Trends for the phrase “Twitter Sucks” shows a HUGE spike starting in February of this year (10X more searches in March than in February.)
2. The recent explosion of a ‘vrial video’ about a fictional new nano-blogging site called Flutter has almost half a million views in the last week. (Or this video from a month ago with over 1.5 MM views.)
3. Last week, Twitter users were hit with the first ‘Twitter Spam Hack Attack.‘
4. People are quickly realizing that the more people you follow the less value you get out of the people you follow. I call this the Diminishing Tweet Value Theorem, which states that the value of your own twitter stream is inversely proportional to the number of people you follow.
5. The mainstream media has grasped a firm hold on pushing their @ user names (a sure sign it’s nearing the top of it’s escalation phase.)
6. Rumors are rampant about a potential Google acquisition and the debate about how exactly to monetize Twitter continues to escalate (another sure sign it’s heading towards the monetization phase of the Tippingpoint Labs New Media Life Cycle.)

While he admits that the evidence cited above is “fairly circumstansial,” taking a look at Gartner’s hype cycle below – it lines up with the general early adopter consensus I’ve seen going around the web and even in conversations with colleagues at MWW.  They’re conviced of some shark jumping going on when they get follow requests from their parents.

So, is Tumblr really next?  I think it’s too early to tell.  I have it run jratlee.com but while Andrew goes over some great background of the service in his post and looks at some interesting adoption rates (definitely click-through, it’s a great read) – Tumblr can be a lot of things to different people.

Twitter hit the scene by being one thing and having a concise purpose.  Although, being so concise might be what is taking Twitter towards the “trough” to begin with.  Andrew makes a great point towards the end of his post:

If Twitter is a babbling four year old, going on and on about nothing important, Tumblr is a smart yound adult digesting content, commenting on it and contextualizing it for their audience. That’s far more valuable.

Only time will tell on this one.

UPDATE:  Sarah Lacy joins the party, calling foul.  Her points make sense from a company existence but, sometimes, I wish TechCrunch would just think a bit more about how people actually use these tools instead of just the dollars and cents.

Recently I had the chance to interview John Paris, Director, Mobile Products of Time Inc. Interactive.  John’s had an interesting path in to mobile.  He started as a CNN radio anchor before becoming fascinated by mobile’s potential in 1999.  John has led the development and design of all the original CNN mobile services and is top mobile content producer.  He thinks that the iPod has changed the mobile world forever and shared with me his four keys to a successful mobile app.

1. Personalize Your Content-   Mobile devices are very personal.  It’s a small screen and the sessions are short. So personalize the app and focus on what the person wants.
2. Localization-  Mobile apps are use away from the office and away from the home.  People are more likely to need the info at these times, so make sure to leverage location-based services.
3. Community- Community can be the most dominate tool in networking today.  Allowing people to plan activities near where they are out and about can be a huge asset for your application.
4. Interactivity- Handheld communication devices like mobile phones are more inclined to interact with brands and people.   Allowing your application to comment, share or vote can provide a valuable consumer experience for your brand.

Thanks, John!

What are some of the best features in your favorite apps?

A BPP die-hard, I was skeptical of The Takeaway – seemingly NPR’s second stab at a hip, in-the-know, multi-medium news show.  Most days, I follow the RSS feed and actually listen-in on Friday mornings durring my commute.

Last Friday, I was treated to a surprise:  The Takeaway was asking their audience to play a massive game of Foursquare.  Throughout the show, listeners “checked-in” with updates from the mundane to the exciting.  Some were starting their day, some were already in the throes of closing out a week.  It was weird hearing these updates verbalized when you’re so conditioned to reading them in an endless stream of ephemera.  That might be why status update services like Twitter work so well/have been adopted so quickly but that is a post for another day.  You can click through to listen to some of the best ones they received.

Scott Lamb, senior editor at another personal favorite of mine – BuzzFeed, was also a guest on the show and broke down the appeal of these hip new social networks:

Like the absurd mundanity of Twitter, Foursquare encourages broadcasting the small stuff, letting people know where you went for lunch. And that’s exactly the appeal — get to know what I do, and you’ll get to know who I am. And there’s an undeniable joy at finding yourself near the top of the week’s leaderboard. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go check in — I’m trying to earn some points here.

Much like CNN on Twitter, it’s always very refreshing seeing and experiencing mediums whom are undergoing massive change (in terms of consumption) embrace new technology that maybe their entire audience doesn’t get just yet but, most importantly, the passionate ones are already using.

Update:  Producer Jim Colgan gives the back-story to why they decided to experiment with Foursquare, etc.:

No major news was broken with this experimental journalism. But in many significant ways we broke down the barriers between the radio hosts and the radio audience. Even the people who didn’t call in were hearing about the people who did, fellow listeners whose experience they shared each time we played or read a response.