It looks like November 12 will be the day that Now Is Gone will ship. We are still ironing out last edits and proofs, but it’s looking good. Once the date is 100 percent certain, we’ll issue a press release.
Autographed Copies
Several parties have asked about autographed copies. There are a couple of issues with this. With Amazon orders we have no way of knowing which book will go to which buyer. So managing the logistics with Amazon is impossible.
If you want me to autograph a copy, Bartleby Press will set up its own online purchase mechanism with a discount. I will drive to Olney, MD and autograph all copies of Now Is Gone personally. Additionally, I am planning an invite-only book signing party in the Greater Washington area.
For a Brian Solis autographed copy, you will need to contact Brian and send a copy to him. Connect with Brian on Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce or Facebook. Or you can go hear Brian speak (which he does frequently).
In order to have Brian sign all copies he would have to fly from SF to DC, and that would cost almost $1000 including hotel. To be frank, you don’t make money on books (see Marketing Now Is Gone), so we are not eager to incur unnecessary additional expenses.
Thank you for your patience with the delays to date. The publisher wants to endure you get a good product!
The sun is shining, the breeze is brisk, and it’s a good day to be outdoors.
Say what you will about the mobile revolution — and come down anywhere you like about the state of the mobile web in the United States. (Yes, we’re behind. Nations with less invested in fixed wiring leapfrogged, and rightly so.) The real benefit of Mobile Computing with regards to Social Networking is not the shifting of space, but of time.
I write this not from my PC, but from a Blackberry on a mobile browser. It’s a beautiful fall day, and I’m able to bang out a sentence or two in between watching the kids on the playground. I can share my thoughts closer to the time I actually have them. Who knows how many really great ideas evaporated before they were adequately transcribed?
The Mobile Web gives users the freedom to be inspired where the inspirations should emerge - closer to where we live and recreate, instead of where we toil and work.
Raw thoughts can be just that — raw. But I can take it. I’m in a good mood. And I think I’ll move over there to the shade…
And a little YouTube action. I lost a hilarious moment with Heuer, Parmet and Israel together, but I’m still learning how to use the Flip for easy vlogging!
Later that night, we had dinner and I got to meet Joe Thornley and Jim Hathaway. In addition, I got to break bread next to Shel Israel (who graciously autographed my book today). Shel’s a great guy, and we had some pretty interesting discussions on PR, as well as the increasingly subtle differences between journalists and bloggers. Thanks to Jim for the excellent photo.
Our man from Silicon Valley Shel Israel keynoted BlogOrlando this morning at Rollins College. He took the stage after a phenomenal intro from BlogOrlando host and Hyku CEO Josh Hallett.
Shel starts up with “I’m a recovering publicist.” Shel apologized for launching PowerPoint, as he said the primary tool of “Command and Control.” He said that publicisists have been playing the audience (that is the attendees) for 60 years.
Paraphrasing Shel, social media — or the revolution — is about the power of conversations says Shel. He gave examples of the big box companies need to communicate en masse, leaving behind the common everyday Main Street conversation. As a result, a contentious relationship has developed. A cold war evolved over 60 years. Conversations could not scale en masse.
With the rise of the Internet that changed. Social media is a cult of generosity. Share everything you can with the world.
Social Media Has Global Impact
A result of his SAP surveys — a project to determine the impact of social media globally — Shel found that a great deal of impact is occurring:
Many tools are available now available to people: Facebook, video blogs, regular blogs.
Culture has great impact on a country by country basis. For example, Kenyans are more enthusiastic about social media than Germans.
Countries like Ukraine, Czech Republic, the Easter block, Argentina are experiencing a burgeoning wave of social media.
In particular these countries are enjoying waves of citizen journalism that are surpassing traditional media viewer ship.
Blogging will no longer be exciting in ten years. It will be as common as email is today.
Cultures shape the nature of interaction in social networks. But wherever you are social media is extremely popular amongst younger audiences throughout the world. It’s absolutely loved and growing in power. In Estonia, 98 percent of 25 year olds and younger are using social media.
The two percent have physical disabilities that prevent them from participating. Free broadband drives access, and people are voiting online — including the youth online via their social networks.
Another great social media moment Isaac Mao in China. The governments — here and there — don’t get social media. They can’t figure it out and are not able to monitor what folks are being said. Technology allows bloggers in controlled countries to move rapidly enough and avoid authoritative crack-downs.
There are 20 million bloggers in China. They meet-up, and gather. Hong Kong has a blogger meet-up, so will Shanghai. More than 1000 bloggers will gather during the Olympics at Beijing. They may change venues to avoid political issues.
“Social media is one of the tools that is changing freedom in China,” said Shel.
Facebook and other networks are creating widespread diffusion of principles. People feel like they should be enabled to speek their point of view. The new generation — as it rises — will become the marketplace. Traditional acquisition will fall to the wayside. Social media will be needed to reach younger audiences.
Shel cites the Microsoft channel 9 experience with Robert Scoble as an example. The recruiting video they used humanized Microsoft (Read the book Naked Conversations if you want more on this and other great examples).
Take Aways
Moving forward, Shel says the biggest barrier is language. Right now Google Translate doesn’t cut it.
The Long Trail (play off of Chris Anderson) from Silicon Valley’s excitement to widespread diffusion. The time is getting shorter and shorter. Shel says we’re a year and a half away from widespread excitement about video throughout the enterprise.
It’s a tricky time for PR pros. Old school PR is still needed. The traditional role of PR. Participation within blogging though will make your social network is what will really distinguish your company. Over the long term by participating, by communications, by talking you and your company can become recognized.
On Tuesday, I had the opportunity to speak before 60 business owners at Ready, Set, Grow, an event series hosted by Smart Business Ideas magazine. It was a tough crowd, filled with business owners that wanted to know why they should waste their time with social media.
You have to feel for them. Social media – and in particular blogging — went from buzz to mandatory in a period of six to nine months. Social media marketing flies in the face of almost every conventional marketing theory these folks were taught. Consider these questions:
You can’t control the message?
Allow negative comments?
Telling them about my company’s products is not the greatest use of a blog?
What’s the difference between this and some egotistical kid blogging about his college days?
But as you know, these are just the rules of engagement. What corporations want are the benefits, the return on investment. So our discussion began with the measurable successes to date.
The reality is that companies are benefiting all the time from social media, from changed brand perceptions (Microsoft) to increased brick&mortar store traffic (Goodwill of Greater Washington). Consider the almost two-year old book, Robert Scoble and Shel Israel’s inspiring Naked Conversations and the many great examples of corporate blogging successes.
Many great successes are still undiscovered. In a chat with BBF Toby Bloomberg, we both were amazed at how many unknown corporate success stories there are in social media. Really, it’s amazing. There are so many companies doing, and not talking about it in the larger blogosphere. Consider Boeing.
How Do You Do That Social Media Thing?
Once the executives saw the results others are experiencing the dialogue quickly became how to engage intelligently. That in its own right is very tough conversation. It’s impossible to do it in a sitting.
Now Is Gone is literally the written process Livingston Communications goes through when it engages in a social media campaign. One hundred pages cannot be boiled down to one hour.
Instead we focused on the biggest hurdle: Getting out of the mindset that companies can dictate the message. Instead we focused on creating value for community and the customer. Getting there took a half hour.
Once value became the centerpoint, we focused on sharing expertise. Give it away so that people will care about you and your company. We used examples of pseudo blogs featuring attendees businesses.
The CEOs, marketers and small business owners realized that the discussion was not about blogging, but about relating to others. You could see the lights going on, ”We can do relationships.” The unspoken Golden rule was implicit in the dialogue. People were excited to talk about the problems they help customers resolve. Who cares about those damn sales incentives anyway?!?!?!
We ended too soon. It’s always too soon when you have a great conversation.
There are many ways to measure success in social media. But do most social media measures really mean anything to businesses? To answer the question, we consider the popular Ad Age Power 150 and other measures. Here are some highlights:
Take One: Becker
…if we’re talking truth, social media measures just don’t mean anything to the businesses we serve or hope to serve. What does? Meeting their strategic objectives. That’s it.
I never joined Todd Andrlik’s, now Ad Age’s, Power 150… It’s the total measure of nothing; although you might think otherwise given the way a few people gloat about their position.
…most social media measures lead people to erroneous conclusions when they live and work too much inside the bubble.
Plus, Rich said….
Sudance catalog (http://www.sundancecatalog.com/) had opened a store in a premium retail location in Las Vegas called Boca Park… Had Sundance used social media measures, it would have been a goldmine. It had tremendous traffic, great brand awareness, high visibility as a flagship store, was written about often, and seemed to have everything going for it. Except one thing. For whatever reason, nobody bought any products, at least not enough to justify the rent.
Take Two: Livingston
…no business or organization will engage in social media for a cute badge on their blog that proclaims them to be the 78th out of 500 companies on a questionable index.
Unless you can attain a top ten ranking on such a large list, who cares? There’s no PR value. There’s only one number that really matters, that’s #1 with your customers.
I think the social media marketing crew really needs to look beyond rankings and the era of conversation discussion, and focus on delivering tangible results.
BlogStraightTalk publishes every Monday. Next week should be particularly testy as we debate whether journalists and bloggers are the same. Join us.
I’ve heard a lot about this ‘Web 2.0′ stuff, and it has me worried. I just figured out how to do my e-mail and the internet, and I’m really not in a position to pay for an upgrade. What is ‘Web 2.0,’ and how much more will it cost me?
Agnes D., Las Cruces, NM
Dear Agnes -
Fear not! ‘Web 2.0′ is not a commodity to be purchased by end-users such as yourself. It’s a series of technologies and structures that companies pay for! You just get to enjoy it!
Dear Ike -
I work in the PR department of a Fortune 1214 company (can’t tell you which one, for reasons of confidentiality), and am the liaison to the corporate IT department. I read your letter to Agnes from New Mexico, and I’m worried that we’ll get stuck with needing to implement these newfangled Web 2.0 interfaces. Yet IT has the budget authority. Help!
Steven J., NYC
Dear Steven,
You’re in luck. You might be confusing ‘Web 2.0′ with ‘PR 2.0′. Web-2 refers to websites that are more interactive and responsive to the end user. They employ a lot of nifty programming tricks that do cool things like auto-fill fields with suggestions, push information before you request it, and allow for greater freedom for user customization. PR-2 is a fancy way for describing what I call the Consolidation of Channels.
In the past, companies would communicate with the public using one medium, and the clients/customers/serfs would communicate back through another. Examples:
1567 - King sends town criers to announce a new tax | Peasants respond with torches and pitchforks
1977 - Candidate sponsors a rally | Voter sends a letter of support.
1987 - Company places an ad on television | Angry customer faxes letter.
1997 - Company sends mailer to home address | Customer e-mails displeasure.
2007 - Ad placed on website | Fan creates mashup of ad, links back to original.
As you can see, communication between companies and people has always been two-way - but not always in the same channel. Now we’ve got the tools to talk to our customers in a more friendly, less intrusive format. And they have the ability to inexpensively talk back to us within that same instrument.
The good news for you is you don’t have to have Web 2.0 to employ PR 2.0, and you don’t need IT’s blessing. The bad news is you need buy-in from the guys in the C-Suite.
Ike - thanks for nothing. How in the heck am I supposed to get buy-in from the suits?
Fake Steven J. - NYC
Fascinating question, Fake Steve. I’ll take that up in next week’s column.
Lots of marketing folks like to talk about Southwest Airlines’ fantastic blog. Fewer mention the $150 million in ticket sales Southwest has garnered from its widget, part of its social media mix. Guess which of these two tactics management cares more about? Yes, it’s all integrated, but business social media campaigns have a purpose, whether that’s PR and branding or sales.
The participation ethos should be mandatory for all businesses. But ultimately, businesses care about the return on investment (ROI) from the conversation. Otherwise they won’t bother participating.
I know my client Goodwill of Greater Washington loves its blog, and the dialogue it has created with the vintage industry. It also really appreciates the more than 700 unique visitors the three-month old blog receives weekly and its shopper conversion rate of 4.5%.
The discussion on corporate social media needs to be more than just ethics and conversation methods (vlog, podcast, etc.). In many ways, these represent the rules of engagement and forms of interaction, respectively.
What companies care about is measurement. Whether that’s SEO, impressions, transactions, change in brand perception and/or resulting PR opportunities. Businesses will demand results that are planned for, not coincidental by-products of a conversation.
This is the great challenge for marketing departments and social media consultants. Finding ways to build campaigns that deliver planned-for, measurable results that positively impact the organization.
This week the Buzz Bin achieved a top 20,000 ranking in Technorati, a measurement based on how blogs link to you. The top 20k ranking has been a goal since March, when the blog changed its name from Diary of an Ad Man to the Buzz Bin and was ranked at 300K+. But what does the actual ranking mean?
Before we examine impact, several people have asked me how we did it. My thank you post tomorrow on the Buzz Bin will lay-out the exact steps taken to achieve this benchmark.
But more importantly for businesses, what does blog rank on Technorati or the Ad Age 150 mean in the grand scheme of things?
1) Not much: My old Managing Editor Andrea Knotts Bona at the now defunct CommunicationsNow oft reminded me you are only as good as your last story. It’s easy to rest on your laurels, but that is a sure fire way to lose daily traffic and RSS subs. A blog is only as good as its most recent contributions to its readership.
2) Links-to do can, but do not necessarily, denote a good blog. Links to are often acknowledgement of good content. They can also result from negative blog posts (not in this case, but you get the point). So if a blog is linked to because it is negative or controversial, its measurement is not an indicator of valuable content. Sift through the links over a period of time to ensure they are positive.
3) RSS subs and daily traffic are much better measurements of blog performance. All of these supposed rankings vary on benchmarks (for example links to the blog) that may or may not reflect actual performance. Performance is determined by readers (who, how many, are they the right people). Google Analytics (a conservative measurement) and FeedBurner are your friends.
5) Perception is great. For example, our Technorati rank enables me to tell prospects in Washington that we have the highest ranked independent PR blog in DC (One local Ogilvy blog is higher). So it equals good PR.
6) Perception is great, but not real. For example, The Buzz Bin has a terrible Ad Age rank of 230+. That’s because the metrics used don’t reflect actual readership, rather Bloglines subs.
There are many, great active Bloglines readers, there are also many dormant ones (I have a dormant account) due to a competitive RSS marketplace. The Buzz Bin became popular after Bloglines lost readership, so Bloglines only represents 4-6 percent of our readership on a day-to-day basis. The Ad Age 150 perception is so bad, and is so distant from what I believe our actual marketplace ranking would be that I’ve asked Ad Age’s Charles Moran to de-list the Buzz Bin.
7) Something to benchmark. In the end, marketing folks are statistic junkies. We love measurement… And we love our rankings. So from a gamesmanship standpoint, why not?
What’s next for the Buzz Bin? We hope to break the top twenty on the Friendly Ghost’s PR blog rankings in the next four to six months. Wish us luck!
I enjoy sorting things, it makes me feel more in control of the massive volume of information coming my way every day. it also helps me to explain things to others in a direct and simple manner.
In my opinion, there is nothing more in need of organization than the flood of social media tools and platforms that keep popping up.
In that spirit, last April I posted at Communication Overtones a list of seven major categories into which you could sort various social media platforms.
Geoff has decided to use this list in “Now Is Gone,” so am I republishing it here.
Social Media encompasses a broad variety of things. Better definitions can also help public relations and marketing professionals integrate social media into their public relations planning.
So, here is what I have come up with so far. Some of the examples I give cross over into other categories, but I have chosen the category in which I feel each example primarily fits. For instance, I put YouTube in “Social Networks,” but the site also allows the promotion of content and could technically fit into “Democratized Content.”
I did not try to exhaustively include examples, though I did try to showcase some of our marketing/PR resources (plus some of the more well-known platforms) to make this a useful list. Please feel free to add your own examples and categories in the comments section.
Seven Categories of Social Media
Publishing Platforms: These consist of platforms and tools that allow the author(s) to set the content of the initial offering. Most offer a way for others to comment on the content and include RSS feeds to syndicate the copy
Social Networking Sites: These sites allow users to interface by becoming friends and/or sharing favorites. They allow the individual user to have their own space, while also incorporating links and other connections to other users
Democratized Content Networks: These sites allow all users to contribute equally, usually with some sort of ability to vote for the best content, or to override, in the case of Wikis, previously submitted content.
Virtual Networking Platforms: These often require third-party interfaces to participate (though some can be accessed through the browser), and consist of a virtual reality experience with other users.
Information Aggregators: These are publicly available, machine driven aggregators of niche content, usually with some human editing (such as adding RSS feeds) involved in the process.
Content Distribution Sites:
Sites that allow the user create, collect and/or share content and distribute by providing RSS, code and/or e-mail options. Widgets would also fall into this category.
It looks like November 12 will be the day that Now Is Gone will ship. We are still ironing out last edits and proofs, but it’s looking good. Once the date is 100 percent certain, we’ll issue a press release.
I enjoy sorting things, it makes me feel more in control of the massive volume of information coming my way every day. it also helps me to explain things to others in a direct and simple manner.
