But I think the opportunities are way bigger than the risks or challenges. Instead of mass-distributing brand awareness with loud, blunt messages, the awareness of what you offer gets passed from group to group like crowd surfing at a concert. It’s not falling, but it’s sure not in any one set of hands, either.
I’m not sure who qualifies as the crowd, but I like how Todd doesn’t discriminate. Presumably some of those hands belong to marketers and some to other people behind the product (maxim du jour: everybody is a marketer). Most, of course, belong to everybody else. Call them users, customers or the people formerly known as the audience–they’re the crowd that your stuff (ideas, products, causes) surfs on.
Seth points us at Brand Tags, a site with a simple premise. It shows you a brand, and you enter one word or phrase which pops into your head that’s associated with that brand. It’s a kind of brand association, and makes for a amusing snapshot of a brand’s health and welfare.
Are the results actually useful to marketers? Probably not, though I could see somebody wielding them as evidence in an internal discussion about brand perceptions. Maybe, for example, your boss at Volkswagen believes that everybody’s over the associations with Hitler. Not so much.
If, like me, you just want to browse some brands, I lifted this list of links to the results pages for each brand:
I just received this message from the always popular ‘noreply@mybloglog. com’:
Hi there MyBlogLogger!
From your IP address it looks like you’re browsing the web via the Web 2.0 Expo public wifi. Drop on by the Yahoo booth (#901) and learn more about what MyBlogLog is up to, we’d love to see you.
I was at Web 2.0 Expo yesterday. I guess they searched through all the MyBlogLog IP addresses, found the ones that matched the Web 2.0 Expo wifi IP address, and emailed us. The message is something like “we used this unintentional digital artifact that you left behind to identify where you were, and then contacted you about something happening in that place”. Weird.
I can’t decide if this is clever or creepy. Or possibly both. On the one hand, I admire their moxie. On the other hand, I never gave MyBlogLog explicit permission to correlate my IP address to a physical location. Do they need my permission, if the only people aware of that IP-location pair are me and them? What do you think?
Last month I was contacted by the awesomely-named Shelly Banjo, a reporter at the Wall Street Journal. She wanted to talk about our ebook (more news about that in the coming weeks, incidentally) and some of the other blogger relations work that Capulet has done. We had a couple of chats, and today we were included in an article about social media marketing for small businesses.
You can only see a preview without a WSJ subscription. I picked up a copy of the dead-tree edition. I’d take a photo, but I’m currently living a camera-free existence. Here’s the section that concerns us:
Others say personalizing a pitch can sometimes win a mention without participation in blog discussions. Darren Barefoot and Julie Szabo recently co-authored an online book called “Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook”. To promote the book, they played to the romantic angle of the title by sending personal, hand-written letters asking 10 influential bloggers to review the book.
They enclosed each letter in a sticker-studded, perfume-scented pink envelope. In each letter, they included the address of a Web site set up just for the recipient, where the blogger would find a two-minute video message welcoming him or her to read the book. The idea was a hit: Almost every blogger wrote about the experience.
Mr. Barefoot and Ms. Szabo took another creative approach to promote a new line of printers for Brothre International Corp. (Canada) Ltd., one of their clients. To ask bloggers to review the printers, they created pitches in the form of comic strips customized for each blogger. The duo found pictures of the bloggers online and pasted the images into the strip.
“You want to be creative, but play to your strengths,” says Mr. Barefoot. “If you are a T-shirt vendor, for example, creative personalized T-shirts for each blogger.”
The article also features a slightly-tweaked version of the comic we sent to John and Rebecca. Thanks to Kris, Rebecca and Derek for their permission to use their photos (they’re credited in the article).
We wrote each of them a hand-written letter on pink note cards and decorated them with stickers. We used one of those silver pens that were really popular with girls when I was in elementary school. When you shake the pens, they rattle like a can of spray paint. This, obviously, was to make the letters stand out, and it jibed with the whole ‘dates and relationships’ theme of the book.
Unusual pitching strategies are a topic we cover in some depth in our book. Part of the strategy is linking to these folks, so that I can get 117 seconds of their attention. I do that on SocialMediaReady.com, and I’ll replicate that list here:
As I’ve mentioned on more than one occasion, Julie and I have been working on an eBook. Version 1.0 is finally done, and today we’re launching it. It’s called Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook (quite a mouthful, I know), and we’ve created a dedicated website for it at SocialMediaReady.com.
I assembled (”composed” sounds way too sophisticated) the background music in GarageBand. Watching the video again, it feels kind of like a government public service announcement. “Hey kids, don’t do drugs! Do social media marketing instead!”
If you prefer text, the blurb goes something like:
If you’re a marketer in a company, agency or small business, Getting to First Base, A Social Media Marketing Playbook will show you how to market products and services through social media channels like blogs, media-sharing sites and social networks. The book provides tips, tricks and lots of real world case studies, both from our own work and our colleagues.
Social Media Creators, Review the Book
If you’re a blogger, podcaster, YouTube star or whatever, we’re more than happy to send you a free copy to review. Just email us at ebook@capulet.com and we’ll hook you up.
One of the things I struggled with in writing the book was what to call (to borrow Jay Rosen’s phrase) “the people formerly known as the audience”. We sometimes use ‘bloggers’ to stand in for everybody, sometimes use “social media creators”, which is a bit dry, and sometimes used “new influencers”, which is a bit too slick.
In any case, drop us a line and we’ll mainline you a virtual copy.
I owe a ton of friends, colleagues, clients and contributors copies of the book–they’ll be forthcoming in the near future.
Nothing Says Christmas Like Social Media Marketing
If you’re super keen to buy, great! Just visit our buy page and click the pretty red and orange button. Make the marketer or small business owner in your life extra-happy this holiday season. It’s US $29, which works out to a mere CAN $29.23. Plus, we’re donating a dollar from every book to The David Suzuki Foundation.
Other next steps for those who might be interested:
Seth Godin writes about my beloved Cowboy Junkies. He calls it the ‘Cowboy Junkies Paradox’, because the band sold huge amounts of their first album and then have never been able to repeat that success:
The paradox occurs at their concerts… when they play one of the old hits, the crowd goes wild. The people most likely to come to their concerts are the ones most likely to encourage them to become an oldies act. Of course, once the group does that, people are going to stop showing up.
Maybe I’m being overly-defensive about my favourite band, but I don’t think they’re an apt example. They probably once were, for the first few years after the monster success of The Trinity Sessions. Because their subsequent CDs were somewhat stylistically diverse, they surely disappointed a lot of Trinity converts through the early and mid-nineties.
Today, however, the people who are most likely to come to their concerts are longterm fans. Those fans aren’t expecting to hear a lot of songs off that first album, because they have given up a long time ago. The Junkies have a smaller fan base these days, but it’s one that’s familiar with most or all of their albums, and not just The Trinity Sessions. I’ve seen the Junkies live several times, and these days fans cheers just as loudly for, say, “Murder Tonight in the Trailer Park” or “Anniversary Song” as they do for “Misguided Angel”.
To the band’s credit, they continue to be reasonably experimental on recent albums. They’re no longer with a major label, and seem pleased to be free from the restrictions that relationship implies.
There’s an expression I hear from time to time that I like. It goes something like “great marketing, bad product used to beat a bad product, great marketing, but not anymore”. The idea is that since the rise of the web, it’s much more difficult to use a zillion dollar budget and clever ads to conceal that your product is crappy.
I’m including this little nugget in our ebook, and I want to cite an example. Does anybody have a good example where great marketing and a lousy product beat a great product with dodgy marketing? Maybe movies? But I guess they’ve always been victims and benefactors of word of mouth.
