Marketing, journalism and truth as competitive advantage

I had a very interesting question, across the table from {grow} community member John Bethune:

In the minds of most people were once diametrically opposed to journalism and marketing. That changed in the era of social media?

Good question!  And actually, I think, that these fields of the social network has brought together in a variety of surprising ways.

The ideal of journalism is the search for truth. Marketing is the search for the product "the truth". I mean, that the best traders are on the way to know how their company for goods and services existing in the hearts and minds of their customers. Their task is to express the right of consumers to the best of their abilities.  So in this way, discipline are unexpectedly similar, even if the final product is completely different!

But the social web has created a significant shift for both scopes.  What it means to be a journalist today? Through the blogs and technology as the smartphone video cameras journalism to democratize.  Anyone may report, anyone can publish.  Jeff Jarvis, City University of New York recently defined a reporter today, just someone who can say, "I was there and he wasn't."

The democratization of marketing

To a large extent, the marketing has been democratized, too. Remember last year when gap has changed its logo and was such a fuss? I felt empathy for the company, therefore, that they are likely to be good traders, who as a traditional protocol – work with the designer, testing, obtain feedback, and roll.  This system worked for decades, and the change of the logo is not easy or flippant decision for the company to make a product to consumers. I'm sure ... do their duties, or at least thought.

But a few vocal people thought that the new logo was stupid (perhaps the people who were not customers!). Through Twitter and Facebook have created anti-logo of the movement. and suddenly it was embarrassing mem. You can imagine the gap marketing resume into this one morning and thought "... wait, what?"

So something as important as the adjustment of the image may not be in the hands of traders, no more. The Gap marketing strategy was essentially the crowd sourced!  Journalism seems to have been also democratize marketing.

The energy content

Content production has also been the output of the process of economic, usually in the form of advertising. But now the content is at the focus of many of the strategies of the company as the struggle to attract attention on a crowded social network.  School of journalism are full of new applicants. Why? Because the content is big business now, and new media channels have insatiable need for.  Companies need a narrator, as well as marketing graduates.

I recently worked with the President of one of my B2B customers to blog and a series of how-to videos to demonstrate their new robotic technology. I'm sure five years ago that he would have thought that would have been in the publishing business!

So this idea of the content and stories is another way that journalism and marketing through together.  For both the content that we are moving through the social network is a success and power.

True as a strategy

I think that the expectations of the "truth" and transparency is another way the social network has brought journalism and marketing together.  For a brand to have resilience and successful it can't shoot right around now. Today, there is a million watch dogs there and some of them can sniff out a fake.

A few weeks ago, I worked with some of the vendors for the hotel chain and we were talking about negative hotel reviews. "We don't mind," they told me "It makes us more real."

Interesting. True as a marketing strategy.

My idea is a few years ago, which is not necessarily what would be their reaction.  In marketing, the truth is that the new black.

Perhaps, journalism and marketing come closer than we thought?  What do you mean?

Note: John Bethune the conversation with me can be found here: "the content is force: questions and answers with Mark w. Schaefer."

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The key to digital marketing success? Be less digital.

One of the things that the world blogging social media is different is that I am old ... to at least old enough to remember how it was before we were digitally tracked, slices, spreading out, prices dipped, consumed and tied to these social platforms.

I worked for sales and marketing before Facebook ... before email … even before computers. And you know that it wasn't so long ago business relationships have been built by the firm handshake, trusting friendship, mutually share the experience and confidence.

And then, sometimes at the end of the 1990s, your company probably took all its order forms, sales brochures, and customer service policies to an unknown man called web developer and he said, "this feature in a Web page."

They could hardly realized it at the time but we were creating a layer of digital distance between us and our customers, which would be more complicated as layer after layer of technologies he was wedged between us.  And it was a one-way ticket.

I'm sure it was effective. And administrative costs and customers have the convenience of ordering through our new machines at any time, day or night.

And yet something is missing. The soul of the business was reduced to computer keystrokes.

Robert Cialdini

We've been thinking about it, when I wrote my upcoming book.  How it works, I had an opportunity to ask Dr. Robert Cialdini, author of the influence of : the psychology of persuasion (and one of my academic Heroes!), what he thinks, that it took to act in this still painful, dense and competitive digital world.

His answer was simple.

"Be more human."

Isn't that ironic?

To be human, simply yourself, you can create a competitive advantage!

"One of the things to deal with advice in enterprise environments is dedicated to the specific functions which can be considered attractive and include them in personal bios – about us categories, and so on," said Dr. Cialdini. "We should be including hobbies and how many children we have, whether we hockey fans, or the runner, and so on, so people can register connection that would necessarily online, but it is typical for the contact. Why not put those online contacts with the type of information to multiple humanizes and leads to the cooperation and rapport? "

Dr. Cialdini showed research at Stanford, which revealed the importance of human connections:

"The participants were told to act through the problem as part of the exercises, but said that if it could reach agreement, both parties would lose, and neither side will receive credit for, and exercises.  When the participants should only act through e-mail, 30 percent of the negotiations have remained locked and people leave empty-handed.

"However, in cases where the Parties shall exchange any personal information about themselves via e-mail prior to the negotiation of the dead locks decreased to 6%.  General human tendency, therefore, to respond positively, if we know something about them when we do something similar with us, when we saw that features available to us, this person persona. These things still work – even over the Internet or e-mail – but we have to do something to implement these technologies with the same kind of information that we could interact face to face. "

For Avatars Twitter and Facebook updates, text messages and Skype conferences are the same.  Still to be confirmed. They want to be heard. They want to through digital distance and get to know you as a person.

Personally, I often struggle with the harvest a lot of personal things to my content, but realize how much it.  How are you?  Any ideas or recommended to share?

A reference to Dr. Cialdini book is an affiliate link.

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Three reasons social media marketing favors small businesses

I’ve spent some time this week attending a few online webinars and catching up on my blog reader and I noticed an interesting trend. The conversations, research, presentations, and case studies focused entirely on large corporations.

For example, I sat through a Forrester presentation on new social web marketing analytics and their ideas on measurement took resources that were way out of reach of the small business owner, meaning … most of us.

Look through the success stories in your blog reader. Nike. Ford. Coca-Cola. And of course the ever-present Zappos. Is anybody paying attention to the little guys?

We keep hearing about the great opportunity for small businesses to “take part in the conversation” but is that really true?  In the daily dogfight for consumer attention, are they being overwhelmed by the big brand mega-productions, online promotions and games?  Are small businesses going to be crowded out by the big chains and big marketing budgets?

No!  It’s time for the small business owner to rise up and embrace the social web!  Local businesses CAN have an advantage through social media for these three reasons:

Local angle — Social media’s greatest power is when it is used in a way that is targeted and local.  I could care less about a tweet from a mega-brand, but I would certainly be interested to get to know a local shop owner in a personal way.

Here’s an example.  I don’t follow Starbucks on Twitter and probably never will. However, I do follow Brian Myers, the owner of JaVerde Coffee here in Knoxville. We became friends over Twitter.  Although his shop is 15 miles from my home, I go out of my way to support his small business entirely because of our personal Twitter connection. That’s how business works!

Personal touch — One time Brian saw this tweet come through: “On my way to JaVerde Coffee but forgot my wallet!”  The shop owner replied, “Come on by, this one is on me.” He just won a customer for life.

Even though companies like McDonalds may fill a room with tweeters, I don’t think they  could ever match the connection and loyalty a local business owner can drive with its customers.  If Bank of America tweets every minute of the day for the rest of my life I am probably never going to connect with a real person.  And for a small business, that is everything.  It’s not just about coupons. It’s about caring.

The ROI advantage — Culturally, I think it is difficult for many large businesses to do anything more than check a box on social media because they expect all the results to be neatly assembled on an Excel spreadsheet or infographic. If you have a moment to spare, I encourage you to watch this three minute news story about a small bakery’s use of Facebook.  Here are some of the social media benefits described in the clip:

Higher customer loyalty/number of visitsHigher rate of spendingFrequent customer connectionA channel for customer serviceEmotional connection to the brandSource for new product ideas and customer polling

Now if a customer provides an idea for a great new pastry, how do you measure that?  I suppose you could create a pie chart.  Pie chart!  Get it?  Oh, never mind.

For a local business using an essentially free social media platform, this list of benefits is pretty impressive.  In fact, it’s revolutionary.

So while small businesses may not be getting the spotlight on the blogosphere, there is no question that, done right, there can be great opportunity in this critical segment of the economy.

What is your experience? Do you have any great case studies from your city you would like to share?

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The Death of Internet Marketing and the Rise of Social SEO

By Robert Dempsey, Contributing {grow} Columnist

Internet marketing as we once knew it is dead. Gone are the days when a sales page was enough of a relationship to sell a product. Gone are the days when claims of riches tugged enough at the emotions to persuade a sale. Gone are the days when bloated claims could pass as truth and lies went unpunished. Now is the time of social SEO. And this time has already begun. Are you ready for it? Let’s find out.

From the time the Internet was called the World Wide Web people have been using it to send communications back and forth. There was Arpanet (1969), bulletin board services aka BBS (1978), Usenet (1980) and then the email system Listserve (1986). The Internet was created as a communication medium not only between computers but between the users of those computers – us. And since those early days we’ve been trying to connect with each other more and more.

With advances in computing technology came the ability to create and post web pages. As more and more people connected to the Internet the need arose to help people find those websites. You may remember getting in your (physical) inbox an AOL cd, or perhaps 10-20 of them. AOL provided a human-filtered gateway to the Internet. Then came Yahoo! and other search engines and web portals. It was during the mid-1990s that search engine optimization came about.

In the beginning people used to try all sorts of things to get their sites to rank higher – stuffing keywords into a page, hiding keywords using white text on a white background, buying links and more. Today these other assorted tactics will get you banned from Google or at the very least ensure that you never show up in the search results. Then in the late 1990s the next shift came about.

What began as a way to tell the rest of the world about what was going on in yours, blogging turned into an SEOs happiest dream. Now it was easy to create a metric ton of pages all optimized for search. But unlike static sites people could comment on blogs. No longer the domain of chat channels, instant messenger and walled gardens, websites became a two-way communication channel. In 1998 Open Diary was the first website where readers could add comments to someone’s blog entry.

And the web was forever changed.

Fast forward to early 2000. Social media came into it’s own and really started to take off. Here’s a brief timeline with a few you may recognize:

2002 – Friendster2003 – Myspace2003 – LinkedIn2004 – Facebook2006 – Twitter2011 – Google+

For a time SEO and social media were separate. As I alluded to in the introduction, that time is over.

Social SEO is the combination of social media and search engine optimization. The term itself is an acknowledgment that the two are no longer separate. In a recent post of mine – Google Proves Not Being On Social Media Will Kill Your SEO - I discuss the changes already in progress at Google. In a recent video with Matt Cutts and Othar Hansson of Google mention in a rather off-handed way that Google is working to incorporate social signals into search engine rankings. This isn’t anything new. Google has been personalizing search results for quite some time. Now it’s going to an entirely new level.

In today’s world of social SEO you must be publishing content that is optimized for the search engines AND is shared within social networks such as Twitter and Google+.  In Google’s eyes which already measure authority using somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 factors, social shares from others are another indication that you know what you’re talking about. In addition, they are now supporting the rel=“author” and rel=“me” tags which allow you to indicate if a piece of content is authored or about you.

Already in progress, the content you create everywhere is being linked to directly to you. In addition, people’s reactions to that content is also being measured and noted. It has been said that every person is a content producer. Now every person is an authority, or can be.

This is where the death of traditional Internet Marketing comes into play.

When I say “traditional Internet Marketing” what I’m talking about is a certain set of tactics used to sell products online, specifically:

Sales pages with big red headlines that insult our intelligenceOutrageous claims of instant or close-to-instant riches with very little workHard-sell sales tacticsUps-ellathons mixed in with cross-sell-athonsA bombardment of swiped affiliate emails that are impersonal and arrive by the dozens

On the social web it takes more than well crafted paragraphs to create enough trust and authority to make a sale. Now I’m not hailing the death of e-commerce, far from it. But the way products and services are sold online by non-e-commerce businesses has changed. A relationship built on trust and authority is now what makes the sale.

15 years ago businesses were told they needed a website. Many didn’t listen.

10 years ago businesses were told they needed to use SEO. Many didn’t listen.

5 years ago businesses were told they needed to blog. Many didn’t listen.

2 years ago businesses were told they needed to be on social media. Many didn’t listen.

But many did.

The companies that blog, that use SEO, that use social media continue to thrive despite uncertain economies. The businesses that embraced stronger relationships with their customers continue to thrive. The businesses that acknowledge the upward trend of social seo will be the companies that continue into the future.

Will yours be one?

Robert Dempsey specializes in direct response social media and blogs at http://DempseyMarketing.com/journal/.

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