In my speaking and consulting work, I frequently hear from marketers who speak triumphantly about creating their latest social media release. For the uninitiated, here’s a little description from Brian Solis:
A Social Media Release should contain everything necessary to share and discover a story in a way that is complementary to your original intent; but, the difference is, how they find it and the tools they use to share and broadcast.
They’re basically standard media releases, but augmented by audio, video, photos, social bookmarking links and other social web widgets. Here are a couple of randomly selected examples:
Social media releases are a crutch for old school marketers. They’re a familiar lens through which communicators can examine this new social web. All they’re really doing is putting some chrome and new mag wheels on a bog-standard media release. And that clearly isn’t good enough.
The social media release encourages marketers to pretty up their traditional releases and check the ’social meda’ box as done. It’s methadone to the traditional release’s heroin. A little healthier, but still not a good idea.
Besides, let’s go back and look at the definition of a social media release. An announcement or story, augmented by rich media and conversational tools. That sounds like a blog post, doesn’t it?
Disenchanting Wire Services
My skepticism about the social media release isn’t helped by my general disenchantment with wire services. We don’t write releases often, and it’s even rarer than we put them on wire services. In the past five years, I can count on one hand the number of times we’ve gotten quality feature articles strictly out of a release ‘on the wire’. Crafting a personalized pitch and targeting specific journalists has much, much better results.
Yes, there are some minor SEO benefits from posting releases, but I’ve never found them overwhelming. For one client (at their behest) we’ve put 10 old-school releases on PRWeb over the last two years, using a paid level of service. Collectively, those releases have driven all of 343 visitors to the client’s site. That represents 0.04% of all the visitors to that site. They cost an average of US $100 each to distribute, so that’s a rather dear $3 per visitor. Add in the time we spent writing, editing and preparing them for distribution, and that expense gets considerably greater. Maybe we’re doing it wrong, but those releases would have to perform at least 10 times better to be worthwhile efforts.
Of course, the wire services are all over this social media release business. They’ve been marketing them aggressively over in the past couple of years. Such releases cost hundreds or thousands of dollars to build and distribute.
Do these newfangled releases actually reflect the new more conversational, genuine ethos of the web in 2009? To put it simply, do they reduce the bollocks factor? For an answer, check out Marketwire’s 2008 social media release about their social media release offering:
Marketwire Unveils Social Media 2.0: Industry’s Most Authentic Social Media Product
Marketwire, a full-service newswire and communications workflow solutions provider, today introduces Social Media 2.0, the industry’s most authentic and comprehensive social media newswire product. Social Media 2.0 advances today’s press release format, offers public relations professionals a multitude of content options, and distributes news in a variety of mediums to distribution channels beyond traditional media distribution networks.
The title says it all, doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t, that first paragraph feels pretty old-school.
Any remotely capable marketer ought to be able to build a web page or blog post instead. They just embed some video from YouTube, photos from Flickr and some sharing widgets and they’re good to go. Cost? Zero dollars.
The gesture behind the social media release–to be more conversational, to eschew the corporate language of the traditional release, to use rich media more effectively–is right-minded. Unfortunately, the resulting releases often call to mind lipstick and a pig.
Today I saw this ad on TV. It’s for Jack in the Box smoothies:
It seems pretty offensive to me, particularly given that it describes menopausal women as ’street rat crazy’. When I compare it to the Motrin ad that caused all the furor back in November (I wrote about it here) it seems much worse. Sure, criticisms of the Motrin piece focused on insidious details, but the sexism of this Jack in the Box seems both overt and, well, nasty.
I found a few blogposts criticizing this ad, and some complaints (as well as some support) on Twitter. There’s nothing, though, that matches the uproar that the Motrin ad earned.
So what gives? Why isn’t this ad causing the same fuss? I have a variety of theories, but I don’t want to bias anybody’s responses.
We’ve been involved with some interesting client projects lately, and I’ve been meaning to share them:
ActiveState recently announced a public beta for Workspace (not to be confused with the excellent, local co-working space), something we’re calling ‘instant infrastructure for managing software development projects’. It’s a set of hosted, customized tools–source control, project management, issue tracking, wikis, blogs, and so forth–aimed at small teams and individual developers. In addition to the collective wisdom and experience that ActiveState brings to the project, Workspace promises to spare developers the pain of manual setup, integration and the apparent endless tweaking associated with managing tools of this sort.
Our longtime client Nitobi announced a couple of exciting bits of news this week: they sold their session recording tool RobotReplay and became shareholders in BookRiff. Nitobi built BookRiff (we’ve done some work with them as well), and it looks pretty sweet. They haven’t gone public with their tool yet, but we’re psyched about it.
In other Capulet news, our first social media marketing bootcamps in Victoria and Vancouver sold out. So we’ve added second sessions for both Vancouver (June 23 - just one spot left) and Victoria (June 4).
We use Gmail for our personal and professional email. As Gmail users know, Google often runs a content-specific text ad in the space above the main buttons in the interface. Tonight, while looking at my Inbox view (as opposed to viewing or writing a message) I noticed the ad:
It is, indeed, an ad for KLM. The ad’s link is here. If you click that, you’ll notice that it actually redirects three times (once from Googlesyndication.com, and then three times around the KLM site). That’s a bit weird, isn’t it?
Is there some secret code that I’m supposed to crack, or is that just gibberish? The irony, of course, is that the nonsense words actually made me click the link.
This week the Vancouver Sun (along with otherCanadiannewspapers) is running a series called ‘The Enduring Newspaper’. Today’s piece was entitled “Ad buyer remains bullish on newspapers”. It’s an encomium on the wisdom of advertising in newspapers. The article quotes the unlikely-named Sunni Boot, CEO of ZenithOptimedia Canada, whose company undoubtedly has spent plenty of money on Canwest ads:
“Newspapers work. It’s as simple as that. We know it works,” Boot said. “Newspapers draw attention. There’s an immediacy to it. There’s a credibility to it. It’s still a very, very good retail medium.”
The article also quotes a media buyer, president of an ad agency and the CEO of Canwest Publishing, Dennis Skulsky. Everybody, as you might imagine, has a dog in the newspaper advertising race. To no one’s surprise, they can’t say enough good things about running print ads. Here’s Mr. Skullsky:
“It’s not just about selling a full-page ad, it’s about an engagement that might have a tie to a digital program, to a website, a video, to a link to company website — it’s all integrated.”
That’s a great notion, if it were true. I browsed the paper, checking out all of the sizable ads. Few of them displayed URLs at all, and those that did weren’t prominently featuring the web address. It was an after thought. Here’s the best example I could find in today’s paper (apologies for the lousy photo):
All three of these ads included a URL, if in very small print. You’d have to be very generous to call these ‘ties’ to digital assets or any form of ‘engagement’. All the addresses point to non-custom URLs (admittedly one of them is DouglasCollege.jobs). If an ad buyer was designing an integrated campaign and wanted to measure the results, this isn’t how they’d go about it.
There are plenty of smart media people thinking about saving newspapers (my favourites are Mathew Ingram and the Sun’s own Kirk Lapointe), and a recent report suggests that Canada’s papers aren’t as bad off as those south of the border.
That said, publishing articles about the awesomeness of print advertising probably isn’t one of them.
UPDATE: Speaking of the Sun and old media, somebody pointed me to Stephen Hume’s recent column. He continues to wage war against the “semi-literate” new media barbarians at the gate, writing in praise of the editors that bloggers (et al) so sorely lack. There’s an exquisite irony in the article’s penultimate paragraph (the italics are mine):
I’m endless grateful to my unsung colleagues at The Vancouver Sun who so diligently keep the egg off my face.
I’m assured the typo was unintentional.
Hume’s correct in observing that everybody could use some editorial oversight. And yet, people keep reading the semi-literates without it.
PopVox is the people’s choice awards held during Vancouver Digital Week. The PopVox Awards recognizes all major sectors of the digital media industry and celebrates its creativity, talent, and achievements. Creators submit their projects and the people vote online for their favorites.
We’re submitting in the ‘Best Do-Gooder’ category, talking about our work to help save the Great Bear Rainforest. I recorded a quick YouTube video for our submission, in which I woefully mispronounce the word ‘tract’:
While you’re at it, you could also vote for PhoneGap (a client) and friends of Capulet, Giant Ant Media. If you’ve got other favourites, feel free to post them in the comments.
For no particular reason, I’ve recently written a few guest posts on other sites. I’ve got a couple more pending, too. I thought I’d link to them in case they’re of interest:
There’s my wrap-up of the South by Southwest conference on Techvibes:
While there were big names at the sessions (hey, there’s Heather Armstrong! There’s Hugh McLeod! And so forth), I didn’t think they were any better, on average, than, say, Gnomedex or another, smaller geeky conference. They followed a similar bell curve from awful to excellent. This is no surprise, as there are hundreds of panels and being popular doesn’t necessarily make you insightful or a good public speaker.
I intentionally tried to go to sessions which had little to do with my day job. I quite enjoyed a session on video game marketing, and my favourite panel was a group of four archaeologists discussing how they use the web to talk about their work.
For the O’Reilly Radar blog, I wrote about a common hiring mistake that startup founders make:
Her response highlighted one of the most common mistakes we encounter when working with early-stage startups: the founders hire too much marketing talent too early.
Why does this happen? I’m not sure, but I wonder if it’s because many founders have a technical background. As such, they’re unfamiliar and sometimes a little intimidated by the challenges of promoting their startup. To assuage their concerns, they bring in a senior marketer with plenty of credentials.
In theory, this looks like a rational decision. After all, the more experienced the executive, the better. Practically speaking, things aren’t quite that simple.
It would be great if we worked for Apple or Volkswagen. Their products generate conversations because they are legitimately worth talking about–they’re beautifully designed, innovative and easy to love. They are, to use Seth Godin’s classic metaphor, a few purple cows among a vast pasture of Jerseys. And, of course, the social web loves purple cows.
But what do you do if it’s your job promote toilet paper or minivans on the web?
Find a gimmick. Devise an original way of talking about (or around) your plain old brown cow. Marketers like to describe this strategy as ‘creating a meme’, but that’s always struck me as needlessly high-minded. Let’s call it what it is: a gimmick. My dictionary describes a gimmick as “an ingenious or novel device, scheme, or stratagem, especially one designed to attract attention or increase appeal”.
Mathew twittered about this iMedia Connection article by Robert Moskowitz the other day, and it piqued my interest. Its thesis is that because offline advertising costs a lot more than online advertising, it must be much more valuable:
According to Michael Hirschorn, for example, writing in the January/February issue of The Atlantic magazine, “Already, most readers of The [New York] Times are consuming it online. The Web site… boasted an impressive 20 million unique users for the month of October… The print product, meanwhile, is sold to a mere million readers a day and dropping….
“The conundrum, of course, is that those 1 million print readers … are worth about five figures a page to advertisers, [and] are far more profitable than the 20 million unique Web users, who… could support only 20 percent of the [newspaper's] current staff…”
The article goes on to cite a bunch of ad executives as they opine on the differences between the two landscapes. There’s a great deal of hedging of bets, lingo and hand-wringing about the state of the industry. What’s illustrative, I think, is how little discussion there is of actual measurement.
Measure, Measure, Measure
We aggressively discourage our clients from spending a cent on advertising that they can’t measure. And I’m not talking about the invented metrics of the ad industry–”brand impression” is a synonym for “might have vaguely glanced at your billboard on the subway”–but actually measuring actions that potential customers may take. This limits their offline advertising options, but if you can’t measure outcomes, why throw money at it?
I was holding forth on this measuring theme at a little brainstorming session for Hollyhock, an extraordinary retreat centre on Cortes Island. It’s the answer I always give to busy marketers who say “I’m already swamped, how do I do this social media marketing stuff, too?” I tell them that they don’t necessarily have to. They just need to analyze the value of all the work they do, add social media stuff to the mix, and see what’s most valuable. If your billboards outperform your Twitter account, then stick with what works.
Speaking of advertising, I read a couple interesting posts on TechCrunch over the past couple of days about the state of the industry. First, it’s shocking to see how rapidly the newspaper industry’s revenue base has declined. The rate of newspaper advertising decline has been accelerating for the last six quarters. Likewise, that article points out that online advertising has declined slightly over 2008.
Something else kind of stuck in my brain from Stephen Hume’s column. His claim that the Vancouver Sun had received 10 million page views in February, 2009 seemed unusually high.
Warning: This post gets pretty web-analytics-geeky very quickly, so bail out now if that doesn’t interest.
I checked out the Sun’sonline advertising site. According to their downloadable PDF, these were the traffic numbers for May, 2008:
vancouversun.com
7.2 million monthly page views to vancouversun.com
522,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on vancouversun.com
theprovince.com
3.7 million monthly page views to theprovince.com
391,000 unique visitors in May 2008 on theprovince.com
There’s some fine print at the bottom of the page which indicates that the page view numbers come from (the links are mine) “Source: Omniture SiteCatalyst, Avg. May 2008″ and the visitor numbers come from “Source: comScore Media Metrix, Total Canada, Home & Work, May 2008″.
Analytics and Panels
I take an interest in those sources because Omniture SiteCatalyst provides a more accurate visitor total than comScore. SiteCatalyst is an analytics-based tool like Google Analytics, and if it’s counting page views, then it’s counting visitors, too. Like any such ‘web-bug’ system, VancouverSun.com has code on every page that enables them to capture and report on behaviour for each of their site visitors. I grabbed a screenshot of that code from a page on the Sun’s website.
