Time 27:53

The problem with many companies trying to get PR and media coverage is they think like a company. They need to think like a news organization about themselves, their industry, and the communities in which they play. In the first Marketing Edge episode for 2009 we talk with Kevin Dugan, co-author of the Bad Pitch Blog. The Bad Pitch Blog is a must read for any PR or corporate communications professional, and more importantly, clients of PR organizations. Why clients? Because you don’t want to put your organization or your firm in a situation where the pitch becomes the news. We get into how not to craft a bad pitch and approaching PR with a different perspective in part because social media has changed the landscape of public relations

Meanwhile here’s an old PR versus new PR list for 2009, Kind of like a PR fashionista list.

Old PR Thinking

New PR Thinking

That’s just a few, we can always talk more, start with a comment either below or at 206-600-6887. Provident Partners donates a food item to a St. Paul, MN food shelter for every comment we receive. Happy New Year!

Time 28:49




What’s in a word? Plenty. Not just a word, but the right word at the right time in the right places can catapult your company to the top of the Google heap. As a former journalist, I’m always thinking about the news angle, whether it’s for clients, this podcast, or the pure enjoyment of staying on top of the issue.

The beauty of this is, search engines think like news people as well. The major search engines pick up trends across the net, reward in-bound links to your page, and give recognition to first movers.

Having a focus and priorities for your marketing and SEO objectives can level the playing field against larger competitors. For example a small, and excellent company VigiLanz, develops infection control software that helps clinical pharmacies comply with a specific Federal mandate called National Patient Safety Goal 3E. With the goal of being focused on this very important aspect of their product, the objective was to produce a high Goggle ranking. The strategy of copy changes to their website and clear editorial intent in news release topics garnered a top rank in Goggle on the search of NSPG 3e software This success, however, can be short lived if there is not a dedicated effort to continue producing content that supports and I contend advances the conversation of your focused topic. (VigiLanz is a client)

Another tactic is to piggyback on the news cycles of topics in your objective. For example, say your area is financial risk management in commodities, when the government announces a new policy, the markets move a certain way, or the monthly trade report references movement in commodity, there should be blog posts, news releases, and copy changes on specific areas of your website to capitalize on the coverage of the topic. To the extent you can get a jump on the topic momentum by using social media trending tools like Radian 6 or Trackur to mention two options at either end of the sophistication spectrum.

In this podcast, I chat with Lee Odden, a nationally recognized SEO consultant. Lee and I share ideas on SEO, PR, and affiliate marketing tactics. Odden also writes the Top Rank Blog, one of the better blogs on the web. Odden will be speaking on a panel at the Affiliate Summit Jan 11-13 along with Andy Beal of Marketing Pilgrim.

YOU COMMENT WE GIVE FOOD

For every comment we get at 206-600-6887 or on this blog, Provident Partners will buy a food item for a local food shelter. So give someone a hot meal by giving us your opinion. Happy New Year.

Time 16:43

About 15 years ago at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium, I saw a guy wearing a T-shirt with the following slogan – It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You – Right there and then I thought “That’s it, that’s marketing.”

All the other words on this blog help address that single slogan. Chuck Hester, communications director of iContact, a large email solutions provider, and nationally recognized Linkedin expert is the guest on this Marketing Edge podcast Hester is as good as it gets about living the slogan It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You. He has more than 6000 contacts on LinkedIn, and they all know him.

Hester lives and breathes the principles of social networking, among them:

1. Giving to the community
2. Introducing people
3. Proactively listening to others (Chuck will never eat alone at any of the hundreds of conferences and meetings he attends)
4. Always willing to help

This simple philosophy, the Pay it Forward philosophy, helps him in all aspects of his life. Yes that includes business relationships, leads and contacts. Is there a quantifiable return on this investment? Sure there is, and those that are really good with numbers can fascinate themselves with all kinds of formulas and algorithms to achieve their desired result. Hester prefers to focus on the relationships, when you do that, everything falls into place.

It’s a wonderful story not just appropriate during Christmas. In this episode of the Marketing Edge podcast on social media, Hester highlights the Pay It Forward approach in social media and in the physical world. His LinkedIn profile is his window to others and visa versa, He created a physical world networking format called LinkedIn Live which celebrated its first anniversary in 2008. We recorded this conversation this summer.

Hester is working on a book due out in the first quarter of 2009,about his philosophy for using LinkedIn. Keep an eye out for the Pay it Forward Chronicles (working Title) We’ll have Hester back when the book is out.

What Are Your Thoughts? Send us your thoughts on how you use LinkedIn or how you get others to Know You. Every comment on the blog or voice mails left on our comment line 206-600-6887 will provide a food item to a local St. Paul, MN food shelf.

On Monday, December 29 drop by the office of Provident Partners to celebrate my 50th birthday, from 12:30pm - 2:30pm at 790 Cleveland Avenue South, Suite 221 St. Paul, MN - hope to see our twin cities listeners if you have time.

I’m a fan, friend, and peer of Lee Odden. His blog post on the Top Rank Blog today is about the best social media podcasts. It is classic in that it serves several purposes.

1. Provides helpful information for the community (key to all of social media)
2. Taps the interests and mention of his post by the people he writes about (you know you want people talking about what your are writing)
3. Drives traffic from several networks by adding a voting component (Ain’t that the idea?)

Giving is at the core of social media, in my mind, and this is a list not just of the popular, but of what the popular hosts listen to. You know it’s like who does your doctor go to type of thing.

By writing about those on the list it generates at least a little conversation among those on the list. “Gee, what’s Odden up to now, let’s go take a look.” Whether that is a list of social media junkies, or the top doctors, or the most desired gifts for Xmas, lists work because they create a foundation for buzz. Add to that the aspect of voting (which Odden does in allowing voting for your favorite podcast) and you have a winning post. The issue is not which podcasts get the most votes, it’s about learning of new podcasts, recognizing the work of those that Odden’s readers support, and appreciating the abundance of talent available through and enhanced by social media.

Odden will be in the Marketing Edge studio on December 29 (that’s my 50th birthday really) and our conversation will be posted soon thereafter. We’ll be talking plenty about SEO, social media, and give a look into how search drives topics and copy.

Thanks Lee for including the Marketing Edge

Time 30:05

What would a newsroom look like if you built it from scratch today? That was the question answered by a project sponsored by the Knight Foundation and conducted at the Chronicle, the student newspaper of Duke University. It was led by Chris O’Brien, who in addition to being project manager for the Next Generation Newsroom, is a business columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. The beauty of this project is that it’s not just research and concept; the blueprint of the next newsroom is now a proposal being considered by Duke University.

In this interview with Chris, we discuss the five principles their research identified for what a newsroom will look like. As I reviewed the principles for this interview, it struck me that they reflect the characteristics that make social media so powerful. Below are the Next Newsroom principles and, in italics after each one, I’ve outlined how PR professionals can adapt their role to be a valued resource for these next newsrooms. These would be either PR managers and specialists inside corporate departments or PR associates in a firms representing clients.

Give us your thoughts at 206-600-6887 or in the comment section below. For every comment you provide, Provident Partners will provide a food item to a St. Paul, MN, food shelter.

Five principles for the ideal newsroom

So rather than start by trying to create a single “ideal,” we decided to identify the big themes. This led to the establishment of five principles we think any newsroom of the future should embrace:

*Community: The community should be at the center of a newsroom. That can mean physical spaces for training, spaces for public events, and social spaces. But it also means making the community an integral part of the news and information gathering, discussions and production.

For the PR professional, Community means: Identify all of the communities your staff participates in. For example, an employee that is active in professional associations, local government. These people can be resources for news.

*Multi-platform: The ideal newsroom should embrace all platforms — online, print, broadcast, mobile — on an equal footing. Any newsroom that organizes around a single platform, and considers the others to be secondary, risks becoming stagnant as those platforms change and new ones emerge.

For the PR professional, Multi-platform means: I’m a big proponent of the right medium for the story. Some stories are most powerful when told by video, while others may be more appropriate for audio. Pitching stories to television because they are good video stories is now limiting. Every media is multi-media, and your video story should be pitched to the outlets most appropriate for that content. Just because a network doesn’t like your pitch for X story, you should look at the same video story for The New York Times because they have a fully integrated multi-media newsroom. Consider ways your information might appeal to a mobile audience and devise ways to deliver information there.

*Innovation: We’re entering an era of increasingly rapid change. The ideal newsroom today won’t be the ideal newsroom of 2012. So any newsroom needs to make innovation a priority and find ways to create the capacity for constant experimentation.

For the PR professional, Innovation means: Stay on top of the changes in the media that cover your company and topics of interest. They may be looking for ways to cover issues at less cost, accept bylined articles (I’m not talking about product shilling here; I’m talking thoughtful discussion of issues. If a person in your organization can do that, then be on the look-out for opportunities as newsrooms evolve.) New marketing and PR will be about testing and adapting, not doing what worked for 100 other companies. By that time, you’ve lost the creative edge and audiences will have moved on to something else. There is no longer safety in numbers. Safety is a figment of your imagination; innovation is critical to sustained growth.

*Collaboration: Because any newsroom will be one among many in its community, it’s critical that it figure out how to work with others in the news and information ecosystem, whether that’s linking, teaming up on strategic stories, or finding other ways to cooperate when its strategic.

For the PR professional, Collaboration means: Companies need to think and act like newsrooms. When issues of concern take center stage, your company needs to react as if you were covering breaking news. What is your company’s opinion of a trade embargo, the price of oil, the health care proposal, or [insert relevant issue here]. You need to either have an opinion or be a conduit for discussion. You can’t just sit around and wait for your new product improvement to issue a “news” release. Why? Because it likely isn’t news. When you realize that most companies don’t make news, they are part of the news, then you’ll start to be included in the real news.

*Transparency: The explosion of information and news creates an enormous challenge for people to figure out which sources they can trust. The best way for a news organization to approach this problem is to become as transparent as possible. In the case of some new newsrooms we examined, that meant a transparent structure that allowed the public to see inside and invited them in. But in terms of content, that also means being as open as possible about your processes, sources, decisions and content.

For the PR professional, Transparency means: This is my favorite. I’d love to see companies conduct editorial meetings every month and treat their organization as a news source. Please stop. Do not submit the following, “Well, we have a company newsletter…” No, that’s a marketing brochure in a layout that looks like a newspaper.

Let’s start by identifying conflict as a part of the issues you cover about the topics in your company’s interest. There must be conflict because conflict makes for interesting stories. So in health care, is there conflict between access and cost? In the finance industry, is there conflict between regulation and growth? In manufacturing, is there conflict between using certain types of raw materials? Of course, and you have plenty of thoughtful ways to discuss issues that are debated in your industry everyday. That is what transparency is all about. It’s not about revealing your secret, patented manufacturing process, or your boss’ stash of Johnny Walker Black in her desk. It’s about being a forum for discussion in most cases about issues in your industry and less about the greatness of your latest widget.

In this podcast, I mention one of my favorite sites, The Frontline Club, an independent journalist organization in London. It is brilliant, raw journalism at its best.
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Provident Partners donates a food item to a St. Paul, MN food shelter for every comment we receive on this blog or on the comment line 206-600-6887.

This post was inspired by Jeremiah Owyang on the topic of personal brands within a corporate community. In some ways, this is more an issue of individual popularity rather than a personal brand, but I’ll use the term personal brand because it is commonly accepted.

The issue of personal brands clashing with corporate brands is something I’ve commented in the past. BusinessWeek reporter Stephen Baker, @stevebaker on Twitter, asked, “How will social media impact business and change our careers?,” to which I responded:

“Hell, everyone is their own profit and loss center. How will companies deal with personal brands that outstrip the company, that’s an issue, who actually owns the information gathered when working for a company will be a battle ground in the coming years. If a person is able to develop a personal brand while also being paid by a company and decides to cash in on the brand, should the company have an equity stake in that personal brand? Ouch, that’s a tough one.”

Steve apparently found this comment interesting.

There are a couple of factors involving personal brands: First, the global economy and multinational companies focus more on the numbers, not on the people. This is not a criticism, although some people would say it is a short-sightedness on the part of companies, but that’s not a dog in this commentary. The point is the 30-year career at one company is extinct. No more gold watches.

Second, institutional failures: Today’s auto bailout is one failure in a long list of institutions that were perceived at one point to be invincible. One could argue that the perception was wrong, that every institution is vulnerable, Senate seats were always for sale in Illinois and elsewhere, that companies always fudge numbers, only Enron, et al, got caught, but again that is a different argument.

The point is today, the consensus among individuals is that they hold the key to their job security, not the entity that happens to pay them for their work that week. In this “I’m responsible for my job security and my skill set” world, attention is given to personal skills and promotion. Some do it better than others.

The Founding Fathers of Blogging

The key people to thank for the explosion personal brands are, Mr. Rogers and Thomas Jefferson with an assist to James Madison.

Jefferson was a strong advocate for free speech and persuaded Madison to include it in the Bill of Rights. Mr. Rogers told generations that each one of us is special and unique.

Enter Web 2.0, and we all have access to express our freedom and uniqueness.

The Social Media Dilemma

Social media claims to be able to put a human face on an entity, a business. If it is done through one individual employee and this face gets too popular then, some say, it can overshadow the business. This is nothing new. In the past it was usually the CEO.

Take Lee Iacocca. For millions he will be forever associated with Chrysler, even though he was president of Ford at one point in his career. The same is true for Jack Welch with GE, a hell of a personal brand that took root and flourished at GE. Welch turned that brand into the Welch Way.

Today many, many more personalities throughout a company have the ability to gain notoriety to a much wider audience than in the past. Thirty years ago the headhunters knew who the top players were in an industry. Today one can forge a brand while working for a company, however, the question is to what end: individual gain, greater value to the company or, the more likely scenario, both.

A case playing out before us is Scott Monty and Ford. Monty had a strong brand while at the agency Crayon. Ford realized the value of social media and the rest is the present. And in this present moment, Monty and Ford are making great strides together. It is an example of how personal brands can relate.

The Clock Watchers and Good Management

A danger of personal brands is how do you judge time spent on developing a personal brand in conjunction with company goals. Can it be measured in time and type of information disclosed? Consider an employee who discusses faults about the company that may be detrimental to the company but can enhance the employee’s “personal brand.” (Please don’t tell me that every fault, every wart, every mistake needs to lay bare on the Web for the company to be transparent. If you believe that, a.k.a. Bob, then let’s start with you. Sorry that may be a bit harsh, but done for affect I think it works, no?)

More about my experience with personal brands and employees in this article about the Bob case at Media Bullseye.

Discretion, whether offline (“Honey, do I look fat in this dress?”) or online (“Sorry about the nimrods in customer service. If it were up to me I would have given you back your $576.87”), is a valuable quality to possess.

Trust is the critical characteristic in a world that has this ease of access to information and others. Trust is a two-way street. Why? Because it’s about relationships, whether an online relationship or someone you manage and evaluate as their “boss” (I dislike that word).

Owyang has written about four ways companies are addressing the issue of personal brands and social media. Jeremiah, I hope you don’t mind me quoting you directly here to keep the flow going, thanks. Owyang writes:

“How companies respond
Brands respond to these risks in a number of ways, I’ve categorized them based on level of sophistication.

First Reaction: Keep marketing faceless: Lean on traditional marketing, avoid human voices to come through.

Second Reaction: Approach with team or hybrid approach:Rather than encourage personal brands, you may instead see corporate team blogs that have an equal weighting to employees. Another example is with Dell and Oracle employees who fuse their name with their employer –it’s both personal and professional.

Third Reaction: Let the customers be the product face: Perhaps the most sophisticated way to market a product isn’t to put your employees on the product blog, but instead, your customers. I don’t see too many examples of this currently, but you can expect this to be an approach in the future.

Fourth Reaction: Allow personal brands to proliferate: Some companies allow for employees to create their own blogs, generate revenue on their blogs, and be who and what they want.”

Regardless of a company’s blogging policy, people are free to blog. (You are not the boss of me.) If they are blogging about work-related topics, then their work life provides them information useful to their blogging and perhaps their personal brand. Even if they don’t mention a thing about their company, by working they simply gain knowledge about the industry, trends, other companies, etc. It’s just part of work.

There will be situations where either side, company or employee, will need to enforce their policy or their liberty by terminating the employment. Those circumstances, I trust, will become more rare as the corporate culture accepts the reality of Rogers and Jefferson and the blogging culture who wish to blog about their work accept the responsibility of their role in achieving business objectives.

The foundation for each party is trust, the prerequisite for each party is communication with each other, the reward for each party is the knowledge gained from the social community.

Time 28:43

Health care is going through some growing pains when it comes to social media. Word of mouth, especially from friends and family, is the leading resource for consumers selecting a primary care physician, according to a study from the Center for Studying Health System Change.(CSHSC) The concept that consumers would aggressively seek out performance information and cost comparisons from sites like HealthGrades and Carol is not taking place as many predicted.

In Minnesota company that bet on their advertising concept in a phrase - if men and women shopped for a ties and purses they would shop for medical care. After a huge PR splash, consumers weren’t buying the concept proving that PR without audience effective buy-in tactics doesn’t drive the bottom line.

The Edelman Health Engagement Barometer echoes the findings of the CSHCS study in that physicians and, friends, family, and peers are the leading trusted sources of information about healthcare. When it comes to consumers selecting a provider.

Where does this put social media in healthcare? Squarely in the middle. Here’s how.

Consumers do not feel confident enough to select a complex purchase without some guidance according to the CSHSC study. This guidance, I believe, comes in two forms, 1) peer to peer, including friends and family as well as patients who share their real-life experience. There are several sites picking up traction that provide anecdotal real-life insights Healthcare scoop and CareSeek are among them. You can even learn about Maruggi’s kidney stone surgery at St. Joe’s Hospital with Dr. Portis. This “someone like you” information gives patients comfort. In the study more than 50% of consumers use information from friends and family in their decision to select a physician. I would aggregate patient experience blogs in a similar category.

2) Professional information from a physician is also a highly valued component in this study. Nearly 40% of healthcare consumers consulted with a physician about from whom they should seek care. I believe this expert-to-patient exchange provides confidence in the selection. It is essentially a check and balance on the consumers leanings based on peer-to-peer information.

We interviewed one of the leading healthcare bloggers, author of Health Populi Jane Sarasohn-Kahn. She highlights how social media is working its way into one of the last holdouts of web 2.0 implementations, the healthcare industry. While it is slow going, Sarasohn-Kahn says there are many aspects of social media in healthcare, only one of which is the “shopping” aspect. For example, healthcare improvement through greater transparency as demonstrated by Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and Nick Jacobs, President of Windber Medical Center is an area of social media that is noticed at the highest levels of the profession and media.

Among the community of physicians Sermo is a fast growing social network with more than 70,000 licensed physicians. The web 2.0 community in healthcare is huge, its leading conference produced by Matthew Holt was overflowing this Fall, no economic crisis was keeping members of this community away from the conversation.

Sarasohn-Kahn talks in this podcast about the relationship consumers have with social media in their healthcare decisions. She also touches on how the once antagonist political entities of universal healthcare may well be ready to reach a constructive solution just in time for the Obama Administration. Her advice, read Critical by Tom Daschle

What does this mean for marketers and PR professionals in healthcare? While comparing Doctor Smith and Doctor Jones along with the cost of an MRI may be a way off in the distance, tapping in to communities and conversation are here today. Whether it is driving health plan members to use online services or a hospital using video to highlight their latest surgery procedures, consumers are willing participants in the learning phase of healthcare decision making.

In the area of public relations, podcasts are used to increasing effectiveness as a source for news reporting, and consumer information tools, Johns Hopkins Medicine podcasts are a classic example. Baby steps in social media is just fine for healthcare for now, 2009 we expect to see further growth as patients, physicians and healthcare journalists are plugging into the budding movement of healthcare transparency.

Jane spoke to the Institute for Clinical Systems Improvement in Minnesota in late November, highlighting how social media is slowing being implemented in healthcare.

Reminder all comments to the Marketing Edge podcast comment line 206-600-6887 or Marketing Edge blog will result in a food item being donated to a Twin Cities food shelter. Your opinion is worth a meal to someone in need, so tell us what you think.

December Drawing:
Use Giftag, www.giftag.com the website for all your gift ideas and whish lists, and tag your gifts that are up to $25 with Marketing Edge. On December 20 we will pick one gift and purchase it for that Giftag user.

Time 43:24

Oh, God, now don’t be getting all upset about me saying Santa uses Giftag. Can you prove Santa doesn’t use Giftag? Exactly. So there.

Giftag is the new gift-registry builder and community platform from Best Buy’s social media team. The best part about it is — get this — it is based on the fundamental principle that the social web is, well, social. That’s why it allows users to build lists from anywhere on the web – not just Best Buy. In my Xmas 2008 list I have warm and toasty long johns (I live in Minnesota, give me a break) from REI, and at Best Buy, an excellent Samsung 46” 1080p flat panel HDTV for an unbelievable price.

This is a major step for any corporation, and Best Buy deserves a ton of credit for implementing a true brand experience that puts the customer first and that accepts the reality that Best Buy customers also need underwear, hats, blankets and plenty of stuff sold all over the place. Isn’t it better to make life easier for those purchases? Yes, and users are thankful for it.

Gary Koelling, senior manager for social technology at Best Buy, was in the Marketing Edge studio and we had a wide ranging conversation, from the concepts of being social to how exactly you can build a list for your Santa’s to check twice, and even check off. That’s my favorite part.

To show Marketing Edge listeners that we too believe it is better to give than to receive, we will fulfill an item on a Giftag wish list. We will purchase a gift for one user of Giftag, like a movie or something that is up to $25. To get in this drawing, here is what you do:

1. Use your IE or Firefox browser and go to www.giftag.com
2. Add the Giftag plug-in
3. Create a profile and a list
4. Add gifts by visiting any sites that have gifts you want
5. In the tag field, include the tag Marketing Edge

On December 20, I’ll review the lists and purchase a gift. See this Santa uses Giftag.
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More Winners

A shout out to Traci Long, the winner of the book Twitter Means Business by Julio Ojeda-Zapata. Traci listens to the Marketing Edge in The Woodlands, Texas, along with her colleagues at Proact Safety Happy Holidays and thanks for listening.

Seth Godin strikes again. When MBA’s are a dime a dozen, and most formal, traditional education is struggling to deliver information that is not obsolete by the time the graduate walks out into the real world, Godin offers a higher education program with mutual benefit.

It’s a twist and from my perspective a combination professional volunteer effort, executive MBA, and marketing version of The Apprentice (of Donald Trump fame) program. So here’s the deal. Six months working with Seth Godin and his team on a new project. Is this something where you will get to do what you want? Well kind of, 3 hours a day you get to work on your stuff. Most of the time you’ll work on Seth’s stuff, but that’s the point, there’s your value.

I admire Godin’s work and accomplishments. He is one of those guys who is able to shape simple ideas into a belief and lifestyle system. He is to marketing and innovation what Stephen Covey is to personal growth and Dr. Wayne Dyer is to spiritual enrichment.

You can interpret Godin’s rules for applying and the type of person he is looking for yourself. I think the perfect person for this program, and for any innovation organization may be described in the following way. Stylistically, I borrow from Wear Sunscreen, you remember this classic.

It’s a person that has been around long enough to know the difference between excellent work from above average, wounded enough to know the obstacles of change, passionate enough to traverse them, frustrated enough by the hypocrisy of the status quo, smart enough to diplomatically unveil it, seasoned enough to appreciate how the world is very different today than 20 years ago, empathic enough to realize that change is difficult, convinced that many institutions are outdated, daring enough to try something unconventional, talented enough to add exceptional value to an already exceptional organization, humble enough to return the value back to the community.

I recommend this program to anyone that meets those criteria. Me? I’d love to do it, however, I’d need to figure out a few details to be a candidate, including, 1) getting funding to replace my current revenue, (wife would insist on that) 2) put a bunch (five exactly) of kids through college and school, 3) current projects 4) living away from family (even though I can crash at a bunch of relatives’ places in New York. God I hope they return my calls after reading this).

Would it be worth it? Absolutely. Good luck to all the candidates.

Apologies for the long headline, but that quote from Ted McConnell, general manager-interactive marketing and innovation at Procter & Gamble Co, will go down as one of the greatest business quotes of all time. He said it in a recent speech where he questioned whether marketers have a place in social media. He doesn’t even like the words social media!

I admire McConnell for his position and longevity at Procter & Gamble, one of the most successful companies in the world. So I hope he doesn’t mind if I take his quote and place it in a slightly different medium just for the irony of it. P & G made an entire category of deriving money from real estate dedicated to men and women breaking up, the soap opera. GL baby, Guiding Light and its super couple Reva and Josh, known in web circles as Jeva If there is a way to monetize the continuing saga of emotional discovery, P&G can find it.

More Movement Than Market

Here I go again with this movement idea, but McConnell’s perspective supports this concept, social networks are more a movement of communities, than a marketplace for your stuff. A movement to connect, a movement to share, a movement to change – albeit in many of these movements there may be occasion to purchase something, and surely everyone in these movements is a consumer of something. I contend, and perhaps if I’m interpreting his words correctly that McConnell may agree, that social networks are a unique breed of communication. He is quoted in Ad Age “I think when we call it ‘consumer-generated media,’ we’re being predatory,” he said. “Who said this is media? Media is something you can buy and sell. Media contains inventory. Media contains blank spaces. Consumers weren’t trying to generate media. They were trying to talk to somebody. So it just seems a bit arrogant. … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

His words underscore what many in social media (ok networks) have said, for a company to be in the social space it requires a cultural change at the corporate level. To benefit from social networks is to be a part of it, not an intrusion in it. The prerequisite of admission is to be truthful, candor helps, to give in the spirit of community growth not corporate gain, and to recognize that being social is a two-way communication. So be prepared to change a few things based on what you hear. P&G’s main rival, Unilever produced one of the text book examples of social media at its finest, Dove Evolution

Given his perspective then, it makes sense that when Comcastcares on Twitter aka Frank Eliason, responds to a customer, it is from an empathic user who may have suffered the same frustrations.

Is Business Week reporter Steven Baker active on social media (podcasting, blogging, & twitter) because he doesn’t have enough press releases to read? No, it’s because he is curious what he may be missing, excited about the new answers he’ll get on his blog that, had it not been for these relationship creating channels, he would have never known, and I would have probably not been quoted in Business Week.

Is Guy Kawasaki blown away by Twitter just to sell books? No, and while people do learn of his books on social channels like Twitter, they come to know him through by interacting with him. That’s what blows him away about Twitter. I know this from listening to him on a teleseminar yesterday, that I learned about from social media. Imagine that.

Coincidently, a few weeks ago, I was involved in a Twitter conversation with Kawasaki and a couple of other folks. It was about the economy, plus I had a surgery that week so it was an anxious time which must have been evident in my posts. Kawasaki sent a direct message to cheer me up (thanks Guy). There is a person that need not reach out at all. His physical world circle of friends must have been large enough to keep him busy, entertained, and enlightened. You see, but there is always more, more ideas, more debate, more risks, failures, and successes. That is the joy that is social whatever the noun you give it, technology makes being social that much easier. Is there money in that? Well, I did buy Kawasaki’s book Reality Check.