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.