The Marketing Edge, one of the longest running marketing and public relations podcasts.
Host Albert Maruggi weaves his 25 years of marketing and PR experience across business, technology and national public affairs in interviews with newsmakers, authors and business leaders.
Maruggi is a frequent speaker and conducts workshop sessions on new media. For more information or to discuss your business challenges and goals, e-mail him.
I hope that revenue generation and market awareness/demand morphs from interruption and manipulation into support and association. An example is this, interruption – my blog post about toys is paid for by Mattel and is about Mattel. This Mattel toy is terrific, my kids use it all the time, yada, yada, yada. Clearly something I’d label AD (advertisement).
An example of support – my blog editorial content is about kids and learning. I am able to focus on kids and learning because Mattel gives me a portion of what I need to pay my mortgage every month. I don’t say good or bad things about Mattel based on their check. I just focus on my editorial content and my readers. Something I’d label SP (sponsor)
Another wonderful example of support and association is the SETEPS program in St. Paul, MN at the University of St. Thomas. STEPS stands for the Science Technology, and Engineering Preview Summer camp. My daughter benefited from this experience just last week by learning about aerodynamics, building a model plane and flying it, all for free, because these companies funded the STEPS program. Will I buy from them or invest in them? Yes. Is this form of product/company awareness better than a commercial that attempts to convince me I’m lacking something in my life?
Social media is about having a stake in each other. That doesn’t mean social media is not a place to market. It’s a place to make an investment in, a place to unify across a like-minded community. This concept is not new, organizations do this all the time today in giving back to the community. Social media allows this “feel good” form of marketing to have greater impact and be a more accountable source of direct revenue and other measurable business objectives for a company that fully embraces the concept, the technologies and the communities.
Let them built it and they will come is an appropriate phrase for the Ford Fiesta Movement – This will go down as a text book study of incorporating real time information about a new product into that product’s final production, and social media as a communications ecosystem for the product.
Scott Monty, head of social media for Ford Motor Company,and I had a fun conversation several weeks back about how Ford was taking a new approach to building and launching the Ford Fiesta into the US market. This week is Monty’s first year anniversary at Ford,and a fitting time for this podcast, congratulations Scott. Monty is one of the Goodfellas of social media.
Situation: Ford Fiesta exists in Europe, need to incorporate unique needs for US market and rollout it out here.
Plan: Tap 100 personalities (now called agents) active in social media and with hundreds of people in their respective networks. Not A listers which I think is so special about this program. It is not taking old mentality and placing over a new, and much different medium. Follow the agents on twitter with the #FiestaMovement hashtag Rationale: They will actively stimulate conversations about the car, get feedback, document their experience online over a period of time. Some of the ideas will be incorporated into a US version of the model and the product will be introduced in the US with great consumer conversations and input in the spring of 2010.
BRILLIANT!
This is a truly transparent marketing (no let’s call it something else) product program. The Feista Movement site has live feeds of the 100 agents who have received the car to drive around for six months which ends in November. This is not an example for companies that fear product improvements or believe the world is the same as it was in the last century. Anyone else can take a page from this experience.
Marketing Edge Reports from Ford Fiestavil (I made that up)
The weekend of July 17 – 19, the Fiesta Movement will be in my neighborhood Highland Park in St. Paul, MN during what’s called Highland Fest. Albert Maruggi, (I dislike talking about myself in the first person) will be there interviewing agents and others who are trying out the car, stay tuned to the Marketing Edge podcast, this blog and the Utterli widget for more over the next couple of days. Have any questions I should ask? pop them in the comment box below.
Last month there was much made about social media’s impact on the coverage of protests in Iran. At the 140 Conference
Robert Scoble moderated a panel of journalists and producers that discussed the impact of Twitter on mainstream news media, specifically using the Iran election to illustrate the power of essentially the people. You can see this panel on mainstream media and Iran coverage after a short registration.
There is a human desire to be heard, especially when the intrinsic values of right and wrong which are universally understood are violated. The social technology in place today helps facilitate that desire. So beyond monetizing a blog and wondering how Twitter will make money, I’ll use today, Independence weekend in the United States, to share a video I did last year with Robert Scoble and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini. After interviewing them, it struck me that many of their comments were about freedom, basic human freedoms wrapped in the context of social media. So I put this Little Diddy together set to John Mellencamp’s Crumblin Down.
Ning is a wonderful platform with hundreds of thousands of social networks from around the world. In the spirit of uncovering oppression, one of my favorite networks on Ning is the Frontline Club and the Frontline Club website
Let freedom ring.
Book Giveaway Drawing – Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan
The book a lot of people are talking about will be available in late August, called Trust Agents by Chris Brogan, with Julien Smith. We will hold a drawing and pre-order the book for one Marketing Edge listener/reader. Email me at marketingedge AT providentpartners DOT net with the word TRUST in the subject line. We will name a winner at the beginning of August.
We enjoy your comments here or on the comment line 206-600-6887.
There are only a few ways humans show they value something… give their time or give their money. Another, for argument’s sake, is to lend their name, but that isn’t a good example for this post so I’ll leave it as a side note.
This podcast with Bryan Person of Live World is about building communities, and the elements necessary to make them successful. It’s focused on how companies should evaluate whether they have what it takes in both culture and potential to establish a community. Live World is both a technology platform and provider of social media services.
In the last podcast with Steve Rubel, we talked about communities really being an ecosystem, not necessarily a destination. In this segment, we are focused on communities as a destination. One of my favorites is Campbell’s Kitchen – an address on the web and a place to get and give information about food.Hey, as a father of five and the maker of a few meals in my lifetime, soup is more than just opening a can, heat and eat. Enchiladas, anyone?
Community Manager Essentials
1) Write, talk, communicate and understand all formats (please don’t say duh, this may well be a new title in the profession of journalism.)
2) Personality, and the sense to understand how the individual’s personality aligns with the brand he or she is representing online (that’s not easy either!)
3) No egos allowed. This is about the community and its members, remember?(managers need to facilitate and fade into background. Here’s where I love talking about personal brands. It is an outright clash with a company’s objective of building community. Please do comment because I’d love to take this issue on. :>) )
4) Domain expertise in the area of the company or organization you are facilitating (you can’t talk the talk if you have a limp in your walk.)
Do communities sell more soup? Well, successful communities at their core get people engaged in each other and their topics. Without their interest, there is nothing. Companies that build two-way channels to listen as well as share are able to capture ideas. Acting on these ideas allows them to be more responsive, gain more credibility and the circle goes on.
Can companies with successful communities draw a straight line to sales? Probably, but more importantly they can connect the other value currency, time spent with your company. Time is a zero sum value currency, the time I’m able to capture from you is time not spent with something else. That’s the value successful companies treasure.
Bryan the Person
Bryan and I also get into his social baby, the Social Media Breakfast. Talk about community managing and stepping back… Person started the Social Media Breakfast a couple of years ago. He encouraged and gave wings to many others in cities across the country.
We recorded this conversation in late May when Bryan was in Minnesota to speak at the Social Media Breakfast of Minneapolis/St. Paul – It is regularly a very well attended monthly event sometimes dealing with advanced concepts or at other times highlighting the basics. Bryan’s vision to create the offline event for an online audience includes some of the elements of successful community building: sharing, personal connections, the dynamic created by some regular gathering that requires an investment of time and effort. Let’s face it, writing 140 characters is easy. Getting in your car, fighting traffic and meeting new people is hard.
Check the list of cities that have a Social Media Breakfast. If there isn’t one in your community, maybe you can be the spark to draw people together, and then step back and watch it grow. That’s what the organizer of the Minnesota chapter of the SMB, Rick Mahn,(pictured) did and now the online SMB Minnesota community has reached 830 members and the social media breakfast held on Friday, June 26 had more than 150 attendees, that’s a lot of bacon!
We all have them on line, those places and groups we like to exchange ideas with. Whether you call them tweets, updates, photostreams or posterouses, (I made that last one up as a new user of Posterous thanks to a suggestion from Marketing Edge guest Steve Rubel.) the social web is state of being, not a destination. It’s a state of information and comments that is fluid.
I met up with Steve Rubel, author of the Micropersuasion blog and columnist for Ad Age at the 140 Conference in New York. We talk in this Marketing Edge podcast about Twitter vs. eco systems as the next big thing. Rubel believes that social ecosystems will have staying power as the lifecycle of different platforms serve a function within those ecosystems. In fact, just as I was about to post this, I noticed that Steve is “Forking” his content from Micropersuasion, a next step in the evolution of social eco systems.
Twitter and this conference show how we have become accustomed, for some obsessed for others, with the concept of the State of Now information, as Jeff Pulver would say. The real-time and regular exchange of information across the social web is an entity that can be measured, and in many cases, has value for individuals and organizations. I look at Twitter for example as being similar to radio, and in the case of trying to dip into that information stream, perhaps it can be monetized.
For example, it might be interesting to note who among your Twitter followers are online when you are. You can do this in Facebook if you use the chat function or Skype has this capability as well. Take this to the next level in building patterns of usage over time among an individual’s followers. Viewed this way, Twitter becomes like buying radio, some subset of people are listening (twittering or viewing tweets) at that time.
The easier play is sponsoring # topics or Tweetchats as the world looks to figure out how to pay for the state of now information. If not pay for it, then justify the investment of time. Surely there are ways to measure Twitter now, formulas like, click throughs, RTs, number of followers, etc, are a decent snapshot. I suggest the more detailed the information available about the behavior of these ecosystems and its platforms, the richer the experience all will have interacting with individuals, organizations, and the information they exchange.
Book Giveaway Drawing – Trust Agents, by Chris Brogan
The book a lot of people are talking about will be available in late August, called Trust Agents by Chris Brogan, with Julien Smith. We will hold a drawing and pre-order the book for one Marketing Edge listener/reader. Email me at marketingedge AT providentpartners DOT net with the word TRUST in the subject line. We will name a winner at the beginning of August.
We enjoy your comments here or on the comment line 206-600-6887.
The 140 Conference in New York produced by Jeff Pulver is a fast paced mindmeld of businesses and personal brands on Twitter. It also featured a clash of social media advocates Robert Scoble among them, leading the heated discussion with mainstream media over their news judgment about the coverage of the Iranian election protests. (I’ll have a link to the video of the panel when it is posted) I’ll highlight here and cover in more detail in subsequent posts.
Business
Jeffery Hayzlett the chief marketing officer at Kodak believes Twitter is something to be embraced by corporate America. His premise is that it is always a good thing to be in a place where your customers are. Whether it is getting new ideas for products or services, engaging customers to drive sales, or refuting mischievous competitors trying to game the system (the latter of these individuals are called Twangers), Twitter is a dynamic place to work in real time. He was excited to bring back some new product ideas that audience members shared with him.
Personal Brands Chris Brogan is a leader among personal brands online. His demeanor and giving spirit are perfect for a medium that rewards candor and creativity. In the panel on the making of Twitter Celebrity – clearly different than celebrities on Twitter – the ability to for those who are committed to providing value can attract a loyal following. Is this a career? Can you pay the mortgage? So far, I believe the model and ratio is about the same as the non-twitter world. You can with hard work, good timing, and the right niche. The similarities I draw here is that just like other mediums TV or radio, are more people join Twitter there will be greater segments of channels, in this case personal brands, with smaller followings relative to other media, but within the context of social media varying degrees of audiences.
Those individuals that have created terrific and engaging personalities on Twitter that we featured on this panel were
An engaging presentation by Carri Bugbee and Helen Klein Ross who tweet in the characters of Peggy Olson and Betty Draper respectively. In what may have seemed like a character/brand hijack, has turned into a creative, award winning way to use Twitter in character. It’s even spawned a new genre called Twittertainment (work with me here). The beauty of this presentation is the raw ingredients that can be thrown into the Twitter pot, it is a medium where you can make of it what the audience wants to receive, and that is exciting.
News and Analysis
Robert Scoble led a dynamic conversation about whether the news media missed covering the Iranian demonstrations last weekend and are they playing catch-up to the news being disseminated over social networks.
This panel was at time divisive, Ann Curry of NBC referenced the tension in the room, but the bottom line is how mainstream media will coexist with social media initiated information. Will there be the time to fact check and provide analysis to the fast moving images and tweets of a breaking news event. I believe this analysis is a critical aspect because it allows for a counter balance to the emotion of the mob and the similarly emotional reaction that such video elicits.
No doubt social media is plugged into mainstream media. I saw this while researching a project with the Society for New Communications Research about the differences in topics covered by the social web and mainstream media during the presidential campaign of 2008. My colleague Emily Metzger, assistant professor at the University of Indiana School of Journalism and I examined this premise and concluded that mainstream media was essentially monitoring or reporting on the major topics being discussed in social media.
Will events occur where social media uncovers or is giving more conversation to an issue? Surely, and mainstream media will likely be aware of this issue as well. I understand why social media advocates would get up in arms about it, however, the Iranian election street demonstrations show how valuable social media can be as a medium on its own, regardless of whether mainstream news decision makers agree or not.
Upcoming Topics
This conference is loaded with seeds of ideas and examples of further discussions I’ll have on this blog. We’ll also have podcasts with conference speakers, including Jeffrey Hayzlett of Kodak and Steve Rubel of Edelman.
There is a toxic formula brewing for journalism in the United States and everywhere there is the illusion of a free press. This cocktail has led to the entire industry missing stories with global impact.
This panel of editors and journalists was wonderfully candid about the state of journalism and the role PR has in contributing to the content and quality of press in this country. Their lament about the status quo of PR and journalism is the echo we all hear: too little time to read every email pitch.. stop sending pitches that have nothing to do with my areas of interest. The members of this panel felt social media had modest to little use as a resource.
So far, no new news here for me, until the candid Bob Lenzner painfully offered that journalists missed some of the biggest financial stories regarding AIG, the global economic crisis, and the bailout details. He acknowledged in retrospect that the media should have been more diligent, for example, in reading the “footnotes” of AIG’s financial statements. He wished those in PR would have highlighted these issues with greater vigor.
It struck me at that moment – 1) journalists or their researchers are the ones that should be digging into footnotes; however, budget cuts over the years have diminished that capability, and 2) the hurdles to get the attention of journalists and those journalists that are predisposed to trust a small circle of PR sources contributed to this failure of journalism to have seen this complex and long brewing financial crisis coming.
The toxic formula includes: a narrow circle of trusted business PR professionals, a dwindling number of resources to report the news, a faster news cycle, a shorter news story lifecycle, and an increasingly competitive news environment.
Can Twitter be an Antidote?
I have seen a wide range of uses of social media by journalists. Twitter is the most visible, with Business Week and CNN being among the leaders in using the platform for information gathering, sourcing, and distribution of news. The 140 Conference is coming up in New York this week. As one of the moderators on Tuesday, June 16, I’ll ask whether social media is a way to counter the side effects caused by reduced resources and increasing time demands on journalists, or is Twitter another potent ingredient that distracts from the business of reporting on serious and complex issues.
Will Twitter specifically and other forms of social media give journalists other trusted sources, will there be the time, tools, or other resources necessary for to take better advantage of the individuals who have a different voice, a new perspective, or a critical counter to the “conventional wisdom” of the select few?
Some of the journalists and news media representatives speaking on Tuesday include John Byrne. Editor of BusinessWeek.com @JohnAByrne – Rick Sanchez, Rick Sanchez (@ricksanchezcnn) and Ryan Osborn (@todayshow) – Producer, NBC Today Show among many others.
Stay tuned this week for tweets, posts, and podcasts from the conference.
Mr. President, allow me to introduce you to Mr. Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Given your comments about health care reform in your weekly radio address yesterday, I thought you would enjoy Mr. Levy’s perspective on building a culture of improvement in health care, articulated in this Marketing Edge podcast. As one Twitter user to another, you both understand the dynamic created when leadership, ideas, and communication come together.
Mr. President, you clearly understand social media from a challenger’s perspective. Mr. Levy has had considerable practice with it in a leadership position. He’s been blogging since 2006 and has faced medical, labor and financial crises in transparent and thoughtful ways. Mr. Levy has built a culture of improvement in large part because of the shared desire among the health care professionals at BIDMC to provide quality care, to always improve their performance. They have done this by being transparent and committed to the ultimate goal of providing excellent health care. Mr. Levy believes, as I believe you do, that the status quo in health care needs to be more open to the concept of improving through a discussion of failures, the uncovering of vested interests that prevent attaining a shared goal, and a clear focus on long-term solutions that are in tune with the changes in our world.
Social media can be used as a partisan echo chamber which will produce little if any positive change. For those who want the status quo, this will be a good thing. Used in this manner, social media will die a quick death as soon as the next Shiny New Object comes along. However, in the hands of individuals in a society committed to being better, lustful for learning, and accepting of the synergy of ideas exchanged around the world in real-time by any individual, not just the ruling classes, then social media holds potential far beyond its role in health care reform.
The conversation in this edition of the Marketing Edge podcast will benefit every CEO regardless of the industry, even the CEO of the United States.
Jeff Pulver is a visionary and social web broker of ideas and people. Pulver saw the potential of VOIP as a game changer for telephony. He regularly addresses thought provoking topics where technology is impacting various forms of society. Now Pulver is actually bringing more than 140 thoughtful people together who are pushing the envelope of Twitter at a two day conference June 16-17 called the 140 Conference.
Pulver believes, and I agree, that Twitter has created an expectation of being in the Now of information exchange. Have a question – ask it now, saw a blog post you want to share – link to it now, near a plane landing in the Hudson – snap that picture now.
This conference is for just about any category of person participating and interested in Twitter because Twitter is what you make it. It’s easy to jump into the blog with the headline like 5 Simple Ways to Use Twitter. Instead, focus on the broader concept of being in the Now with information from around the world. Discussing how people from all walks of life have benefited in their profession and their personal life.
Marketing Edge listeners and reader, register for the 140 Conference using the promo code MarketingEdge for a $100 credit toward your registration to the 140 Conference. I look forward to spending two days at the conference moderating a panel at this dynamic conference.
Bruce Zanca, SVP and Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of Bankrate INC, has spent his career reconciling the agendas of journalist with clients, (e.g. employer). In his current position, he has connected the dots between PR and revenue. Bankrate is a media content platform that raises revenue through advertising. The number of eyeballs on the site are increased the more valuable information about personal finance is on the site other when other media carry information originated by Bankrate Inc which further drives Bankrate.com traffic.
Brankrate.com is in the top ten personal finance websites with information from mortgage rates and car loans to Certificates of Deposit and credit card rates. It is also a resource for other financial and consumer media and bloggers.
In this “Soundbites From the Road” podcast, Zanca and I discuss the highlights of using experts to provide greater depth of information and analysis. This is a good follow-up to the Marketing Edge podcasts with author Paul Schempp of the book, 5 Steps to Expert. We did a two part series with Dr. Schempp, part 1, 5 Steps to Expert podcast posted on May 16 and part 2 featuring how experts continue to learn was posted on May 26 about developing experts within an organization for PR objectives.
Zanca combined the use of a unique checking study Bankrate conducted, a financial industry analyst to provide commentary and depth of the study, and advanced top tier media interest (USA Today) that helped drive significant coverage of the topic. We put the pieces together in this Marketing Edge podcast. Last week, Bankrate won a Bulldog Reporter Gold Award for this program.
Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2009 Best Website – Business/Consumer
Gold Winner
Bruce Zanca, Kayleen Keneally, Chris Spagnuolo
Bankrate, Inc for
Bankrate, Inc “Bankrate.com’s 2008 Checking Study”
The current PR dynamic is comprised of the following characteristics:
1) less reporters (layoffs and all) to do more work, and
2) the potential for greater exposure of company produced information via search engine rankings, whether it’s a news release, blog post or podcast.
This environment necessitates having a bull pen of experts to produce content in order to have a successful sustained PR program.
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