Content Matters

Five Questions for David Meerman Scott

This week, Content Matters caught up with e-marketing thought leader David Meerman Scott. David is a highly sought-after speaker and is author of the "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" and "Cashing In With Content". His newest book, World Wide Rave: Creating Triggers that Get Millions of People to Spread Your Ideas and Share Your Stories was published last week and is quickly moving up the marketing and e-commerce charts on Amazon. David can also be found @dmscott.

David is one of my favorite marketers to read or hear because he eats his own dog food. His speaking career was jump-started to some extent by the "world wide rave" started by his earlier eBook on the New Rules of PR (which he later turned into a full-length hardbound book). The ebook, which suggested that in the web environment, companies should target their PR efforts directly to end-users rather than to traditional media channels, was quite provocative at the time and set off a bit of a flame war on the PR and media blogs. That led to several hundred thousand downloads of the ebook and lay the groundwork for much of his subsequent work. So, when David speaks (or writes), I pay attention.

Content Matters: Your new book, World Wide Rave, discusses ways in which marketers can trigger the type of web buzz that typically happens only virally. Can you share a couple of examples of companies who’ve done that well?

David Meerman Scott: A World Wide Rave is when masses of people around the world can’t stop talking about you, your company, and your products. Whether you’re located in San Francisco, Dubai, or Reykjavík, it’s when global communities eagerly link to your stuff on the Web. It’s when online buzz drives buyers to your virtual doorstep. And it’s when tons of fans visit your Web site and your blog because they genuinely want to be there.

One of my favorite stories is Erin Weed, founder of Girls Fight Back!, uses her Web site, MySpace and Facebook groups, blog, and YouTube videos as a way to promote women's safety and self-defense issues.

Girls Fight Back makes safety education accessible, especially to young women in their teens and twenties, through her education Web site and live seminars conducted all over the United States. She teaches girls and young women why they are their own best protectors, and then shows them how to reduce the risk of violence and fight back if necessary. Amazingly, Erin has trained over a half million girls and women to fight back.

Anywhere from 200 to 1,000 people attend each hour-and-a-half-long seminar. Erin was having a hard time getting the teen and college girls to log on to her website after speaking gigs and paper sign-up forms to gather email addresses for 500 or more girls at a time was impractical. She realized she had to somehow get to them (as opposed to the other way around). So she gets all the girls to text message their email addresses from their mobile phones, which automatically load to a web page.

Get this... nearly 100% of the girls volunteer their email addresses. Clearly, Erin's understanding about how girls and young women communicate (with mobile phones) is critical. Yet how many organizations fail to understand this? All I have to do is look in my home mailbox and see all the junk mail that colleges, camps, and the like are sending to my teenage daughter.

Another favorite example is Lisa Genova. After her novel, Still Alice was rejected by publishers, she decided to self-publish her novel and received a stamp of approval from the Alzheimer's Association. Her blogs developed a huge platform and the book sold briskly.

As a result of Lisa's World Wide Rave plus the measurable sales success on Amazon.com and other online booksellers, Lisa generated buzz in the book world too. An agent contacted her and sold the book at auction in June 2008 for just over half a million dollars to Simon & Schuster. The book, that the publishing world initiall ignored, was a World Wide Rave and when the new edition was released in January 2009, it made the New York Times Bestseller list.

CM: You encourage companies to “Lose Control”, asking them whether they’re more like the Grateful Dead (encouraging sharing) or Led Zeppelin (total control). Publishers have been having this debate for 20 years. What are some simple steps that publishers, locked into a control mindset, might take to get outside their comfort zone? How can they go from being "Trampled Underfoot" to creating a "Ripple"?

DMS: If you step back and look at the ways musicians make money besides the recordings—concerts, endorsement deals, merchandise (such as $35 t-shirts), and “souvenir” packaging of the music (booklets included in a CD case, for example), not to mention royalties for the use of music in television, movies, and advertising—you start to suspect that clamping down with rigid controls may not be the best strategy. Think about that: the music industry is trying to prevent the spread of their product!

If I were a music executive (or musician), I’d make much of my music available for free online, and I’d encourage people to share it. I would have the confidence that providing music for free would drive sales of my other products. Many unsigned bands are prospering with this strategy through their own MySpace pages or Web sites, and some are finding absolutely tremendous success.

CM: You recently wrote about Century 21 real estate shifting its national television advertising budget to online. With current economic conditions, do you see more of this in 2009? Are there specific sectors or market segments where this seems more likely to occur?

DMS: Marketing on the Web can be free. It costs nothing to put up a YouTube video. It costs nothing to create a blog. It costs nothing to create a presence on Facebook. Yes, with the economic downturn, smart companies are looking to leverage the Web in new ways.
We’re living in a time when we can reach the world directly, without having to spend enormous amounts of money on advertising and without investing in huge public relations efforts to convince the media to write (or broadcast) about our products and services. There is a tremendous opportunity right now to reach buyers in a better way: by publishing great content online, content people want to consume and that they are eager to share with their friends, family, and colleagues.

CM: As marketing budgets get slashed, what are a couple of things that nimble marketers might focus on to maximize their marketing ROI?

DMS: Yes, you can harness that power and virtually anybody, if they're smart about creating something interesting, can generate something that will spread. Now, that's not to say that everybody can generate a million views of a YouTube video, or that if you do something, everyone in the world will know about it.

Within your marketplace, among the people you're trying to reach, if you have a niche product, it's still absolutely possible to reach a large number of your potential customers online with something very interesting. It could be a video, an e-book, some kind of chart or graphic, a photograph, some data or metrics, or an interesting way of looking at what's going on in the marketplace. It's possible to spread any one of those things. Yet most companies haven't been creating information with the idea that it's going to spread. Instead they've been creating information with the idea that they have to ram it down people's throats. It's a very, very different technique to create something that is primed to be shared.

CM: While there’s a lot of gloom and doom about, there are always bright spots. What are you optimistic about in 2009 (professionally or personally)?

DMS: I'm very optimistic. So are all of my smart friends. When there is chaos and fear, there is also a tremendous opportunity.

 

Alacra Pulse Launch Wrap

The past two days have been a lot of fun. We launched Alacra Pulse Wednesday morning and it's been a busy couple of days. Yesterday was a whirlwind for me. I woke up with adrenaline racing, which quickly turned to "what if..." anxiety during the commute then back to an adrenaline rush the rest of the day.

This was a pretty exciting launch for Alacra. Most of our products focus on niche markets and the products generally sit behind a subscriber login wall.

Alacra Pulse was different for us. It’s probably the first product we’ve built that has strong potential appeal for the mainstream user. Plus, it’s the first freemium app that we’ve built, so it’s out there for the world to see. And (we hoped) those factors would also give it appeal to media and blogs.

The launch went largely as we’d hoped. The product performed as expected and the media response exceeded expectations.

We did more preparation on the PR side than we’d done in the past. Following a recommendation from David Meerman Scott, we built a media room for Alacra Pulse. It’s nothing flashy, but it gave us a structure to package the press release, product details, screen shots, FAQs and other background information in a single place. That made it easier for bloggers and journalists to write the story.

The day started well, when the launch was picked up by the respected blog A VC (authored by Alacra board member Fred Wilson) and by FreePint’s VIP LiveWire service. Those were followed by an article by Michelle Manafy at eContent (btw - if you haven't seen it, you should read this FierceContentManagement interview with Michelle).

The Alacra Pulse launch got picked up by several other news sites and blogs throughout the day, including this thoughtful post by Steve Sieck at SKS Advisors, and later peaking with a piece on TechCrunch that afternoon.

Throughout the day we also monitored tweets. There were more than a hundred Pulse-related tweets during that first day.

Of course, the launch is just the beginning. In the days and weeks to come, we'll be working hard to build on that initial splash to grow the Pulse user base. If you've been using Pulse and have some feedback, please drop me a note or post a comment below. If you haven't tried it yet, visit the site and then share your thoughts.

BTW - You can follow @AlacraPulse on Twitter.

The Content Matters Flock

Via Bambi Francisco, at VatorTV, I stumbled across this Twitter follower tag cloud utility. Twittersheep looks at the bios of the followers of any Twitter user and plots them as a tag cloud.
Useful? Not really, but fun to play with.

Introducing Alacra Pulse: Where Wall Street and the Alternative Media Meet

I’m excited this morning to publicly announce the launch of Alacra Street Pulse, the product that we’ve been working on for the past 6-9 months.

Street Pulse was borne of two related trends that we’ve been following for the past 12-24 months:

1. The diminishing role of sell-side research; and
2. The rise of the professional blogger

In discussions with clients, we’ve heard that there is a strong interest in alternative media, but that there was an even greater concern about quality. Our clients were not ready to turn on a fire hose of blog content for bankers and other professionals to consume.

So, today, we introduce the Alacra Pulse Platform and its first application, Street Pulse.

Alacra Pulse finds, filters and packages web-based content that lets you quickly consume relevant, important information about a company. 

Alacra Pulse has two parts. The underlying platform reads web-based RSS feeds – from newspapers, magazine, trade publication sites and blogs – and extracts information from each article or post.  We first extract or tag entities (companies) from each piece of content and then we look for business events such as an analyst comment, a bankruptcy filing, news or rumors of an M&A transaction, or a quote by a CEO.  On top of the platform sit a series of event-specific applications, which drive current awareness, competitive intelligence and idea generation for users.

Alacra Street Pulse, our first app on the new platform, answers the question “what do key opinion leaders have to say about…” a company today? Street Pulse brings together comments by traditional analysts – sell-side, industry and credit analysts – with those of a group of hand-selected bloggers.

Alacra Pulse uses the freemium business model. There’s a free version at http://pulse.alacra.com. That version is supported by advertising plus links to contextually relevant content for purchase at the Alacra Store.

There’s also a professional version, which provides added functionality like portfolios, email alerts, information sharing features and advanced search capabilities.

In the coming months, we will launch additional event-specific applications focusing on M&A deals & rumors, distressed companies, CEO quotes and more.

I'd love to hear your feedback on Street Pulse. Please visit Street Pulse and play with the app. Let me know what you think, either in the comments below or drop me a note at barry-dot-graubart at alacra-dot-com.

Why full-text RSS matters (hint: mobile)

I've cut down on my RSS reading over the past 12-18 months. A lot of feeds that I might have read periodically, I have now dropped, replaced in part by what I see on Twitter.
But there are still around 15-20 RSS feeds that I like to read on a daily basis. I no longer read them on my desktop, however. I just don't have time. Instead, I like to read RSS feeds on my iPhone (using NetNewsWire, a great reader from Newsgator).

I read the feeds when I have dead time - on the subway, standing on line at the Indian takeout joint, etc. It lets me keep up with the info I need without being yet another distraction from getting work done. And, when I find something compelling, I can email it to myself with a couple of clicks.

That's why getting the full text of an RSS feed is so important to me. As a mobile user, I want to consume content on the mobile device and don't want to have to click through to a browser. That's why I was disappointed this morning to see that one of my favorite blogs, 24/7 Wall Street, has switched their feed to show just a snippet with a message telling me the full text is available on the website.
 
The snippet-based feeds have long been used by newspapers and that might make sense, particularly for those with content behind the pay wall. But blogs typically have full text in their feeds.

I understand the desire to monetize all your readers through your website, but for me, if it doesn't fit my workflow, I just won't read it anymore. That means that I'll miss content that I find valuable and stuff I might otherwise link to on this blog or share via Twitter or Delicious. In the long run, blogs that only provide snippets in their RSS will hurt themselves as they will lose readers and, more importantly, the buzz that comes from their content being shared to new users.

As content consumption moves to the smaller screen, more and more users will be using their smartphones as their primary means of reading information. Content providers should optimize the user experience for smartphones and other mobile devices if they want to maximize their readership.

TweetDeck Adds StockTwits, Hashtag Support, Other Features

TweetDeck has been my primary desktop Twitter client for a while now. While I'd played with Twhirl and a few others, TweetDeck has provided the best user experience to-date. As of today, that user experience has gotten even better. For those who haven't used it, TweetDeck is an Adobe Air based desktop client for Twitter, that provides a multi-column view allowing you to more easily identify @replies and DMs.

The new version of TweetDeck, available for download, has plenty of compelling new features.

 At the top of that list (for me) is direct support for StockTwits. Now you can see your StockTwits feed in a TweetDeck panel as shown here. This follows a $500k investment in TweetDeck from a group of angels including StockTwits co-founded Howard Lindzon, among others.

TweetDeck also now has hashtag support - when you compose a tweet, a drop-down displays links to insert any of the last 10 hashtags you've used. This is great when tweeting a conference or event. It also automatically inserts the hashtag when you reply to a tweet containing a hashtag. While this won't provide full message threads, it's a step in that direction.

Another feature that I'll use frequently is the one-click "email tweet", so I can more easily share tweets with users who are not on Twitter. I hope mobile clients like Twitterfon add this, as I frequently view Tweets on my iPhone that I want to forward to myself for later review.

There are lots of other features including the ability to translate individual tweets on the fly,

Marshall Kirkpatrick has a full review over at Read/Write/Web but the best way to start is to download it and play with it. If you're still going to the Twitter web page, you'll find this is a game-changing app for Twitter.

Five Questions for Laura Fitton

Where is social media headed in 2009? Content Matters caught up with Laura Fitton of Pistachio Consulting to gain her insights on social media.

For those who don't know her, Laura is a social media guru who has been leading the charge on use of Twitter for microsharing. She can be found @pistachio and also runs the Touchbase Blog and authors her own Pistachio Blog. A mother of two lovely girls, Laura also plays competitive ice hockey.

Content Matters readers will recognize Laura from my earlier posts tracking the progress of her WellWishes project, using microdonations to raise funds for Charity:Water (details below). Laura is dynamic, creative and truly inspirational.

Content Matters: 2009 will certainly have its share of challenges. What do you see for social media in 2009?

Laura Fitton: Social media needs to grow up and get outside of the fishbowl. As practitioners we need to spend more time and energy engaging new hearts and minds and "teaching them to fish" and less time obsessing amongst ourselves over rules and rankings and the finer niceties of "how to do it."

While there certainly are many hucksters coming to the table and selling "social media snakeoil," serious practitioners just shouldn't get caught up in calling them out and decrying their practices. Every trade has professionals achieving at different levels. Make things great for your clients, hold their business value above all else, and don't waste time and energy criticizing others. When people obsess about the plethora of self-declared "experts" I always say "expert is as expert does."

CM: Facebook was all the rage in 2007, while Twitter took center stage in 2008. Do you think Twitter has staying power? If so, what's different about Twitter?

LF: I do. There's a lot that's different, and it's best exemplified by the culture and results coming out of Twitter. It's become the most sensitive news detection system anyone's seen. It's become a tremendously fertile forum of spreading ideas, keeping apprised of events, finding resources and interesting people to connect with. It's mobile. It's publish-subscribe. It's a social network. It can be consumed via hundreds of different interfaces, to truly "use it where you think best." It lets busy executives spread ideas and information on-the-go, from the midst of their demanding schedules, in a way that blogging never could. We see social movements and adhoc groups form every day on Twitter. Its ability to connect people is incredibly powerful, and we're only just sorting out precisely why that is.

Twitter - or the general class of "microsharing" because I believe there will eventually be other Twitter-compatible versions - may go every bit as mainstream as email and search. Of note, it's going mainstream much faster than email did. People love to point to Facebook and say but *that's* mainstream, Twitter is niche. True today, but it won't be true forever. There's a different culture and dynamic on Twitter, and while much simpler it's MUCH more versatile. Information and ideas do not spread on Facebook the way they do on Twitter, that's for sure.

When I conducted a survey to find out "What does Twitter disrupt?" Facebook and email were right up there. But surprisingly, so was "isolation." Twitter changes lives - both personally and professionally. There are millions that LOVE Facebook, yes, but there's an energy and richness of infromation flow to Twitter that doesn't happen there.

CM: In many ways, the most promising use of Twitter this year came in Q4 by combining Twitter with micro-donations to nonprofits. Can you share with us some of the details of your Well Wishes project for Charity:Water?

LF: What an incredible and humbling experience that was. I wanted to see if I could move the needle somewhat substantially by asking very  very little from very many people. I asked for $2 each, or $25,000 since I had 12,500 readers at the time. Between the Twitter community and some corporate matching sponsors, my wishes somehow came true. It was truly a "stone soup" project, with many coming together. These are tough times, and we need low-cost ways to pull together as a community and help one another through them.

It was also the first large-scale deployment and use of direct currency right on Twitter. About $20,000 (including the matching funds) was exchanged on Twitter using a new tool called @tipjoy. I only vaguely knew about @tipjoy before the campaign, but for months I had been looking and waiting for someone to become "the PayPal of Twitter." Now they've asked me to be an advisor, because we enjoyed working on the campaign so much.

CM: Much of the corporate success of Twitter has been in the customer service area, with companies like Comcast and Dell monitoring Twitter for customer problems. While "listening" on Twitter has succeeded, brands seeking to broadcast their message on Twitter have largely failed, due to the opt-in nature of the platform. Beyond customer care, where do you see companies succeeding with Twitter going forward?

LF: Not true. Broadcasting USEFUL information totally works on Twitter. You just can't be selfish. You hear a lot about Twitter being personality and conversationally driven, and it is, but it does not have to be. That's not the only way. Look at @delloutlet, which sold over a $million worth of computers by offering something truly useful and valuable to the community -- signficant time-limited discounts.

The true nature of the listening opportunity on Twitter is not well understood either. We show our clients how they can do better, and instant, market and innovation research, we show them ways to run internal and external meetings better, and for their executives to be better leaders. It even percolates down to HR, mentoring, professional development and a full range of core business processes. You have to know the territory. You have to gain Twitter literacy, not just run out there and try to coopt it along the lines of your existing marketing and communications beliefs and objectives.

Which brings up another VERY important point. Social media is NOT merely a marketing or even communications channel. Social media can be (and should) be infused throughout the entire business. I love what Peter Kim has been writing lately about "Social business." The business case for social media is to master the fundamentals and apply them to becoming - to borrow from SAP - a better run business.

CM: While there's a lot of gloom and doom about, there are always bright spots. What are you optimistic about in 2009 (professionally or personally)?

LF: #pinkslipparty, @wellwishes and Twitter in general have showed me a LOT about what individuals can accomplish when we network together in fluid, dynamic (and yes, passionate) ways. I have a ton of hope for the world, and I've personally been through some pretty difficult spots in the past four years. It sounds pollyanna, but it's sincere. Tough times are great times to toughen your resolve and boost your hope. Being frustrated, afraid, bitter or anxious isn't going to materially improve a bad situation. Quite the opposite. Why bother?

 

Twitter Identity Spoofing on the Rise

The central reason that Twitter is hard to spam is that it's all based on followers. Marketers who have tried to use Twitter to blast their marketing message have found it difficult, because no one is likely to follow them. So, there have been a bunch of methods spammers have used to trick users into following them, the most common being the use of a photo of an attractive woman for their image (when it's likely some fat guy who's actually behind the account).

The newest approach is to try to assume the identity of another popular Twitter user. In the past few days, I've received a bunch of follows from users whose names appear to be the same as someone I follow, except they've added an underscore at the end of the name. So, instead of Barry Schwartz' @rustybrick, it's some spammer using @rustybrick_ as the ID. They even go so far as to steal the image that the original user has for their ID.

Luckily, the spammers seem to be getting caught pretty quickly. By the time I've tried to click through to their profile pages, I see the Twitter Suspended account message.

I've no doubt that the spammers will continue to explore creative ways to try to gain followers, particularly as more newbies join Twitter. Having brought a number of new users to Twitter myself, I always caution them to use the following approach before following anyone back:
1.  Check the website link and bio
2. Look at the number of tweets they've authored. If it's just a handful, there's no reason to follow
3. Look at the following:followers ratio. If it's more than 3:1, it's a warning sign

In the meantime, I'm sure the team at Twitter will continue to tweak their algorithms to detect spammers.

Do Tech Companies Need PR?

Marshall Kirkpatrick at Read Write Web started a bit of a meme frenzy today with his post Does Good Tech Need PR? The post got me thinking about my experiences using both internal and external resources for PR and what has worked and what hasn't.

First, PR for tech is often more than simply the traditional media relations. Most successful startups are staffed with great technical people but are typically weaker on the business side. If you're lucky, you've got a good product marketing/product management type, but it's rare to have strong marketing communications capabilities, particularly in the early stages. As a result, techs often look to their PR firms to help them create messaging and positioning material, developing decks and perhaps some marketing collateral.

Next, the PR firm will develop the communications strategy for reaching five key audiences:

1. Traditional media
2. Bloggers and alternative media
3. IT analysts; and, perhaps
4. Sales prospects (particularly for enterprise software)
5. Investors if the company is raising capital

Then, on an ongoing basis, the PR firm should be doing constant outreach, at least to the first three groups above.

So, should tech companies utilize PR? Of course they should, but with a few caveats:

First, keep in mind that while PR firms can craft and communicate your message, they don't understand your product or your market the way that you (hopefully) do. So, you have to work closely with your PR firm in developing the messaging, hopefully based upon real-world experiences with your early adopter users.  If you can't explain the benefits that your users are getting from your product, no PR firm in the world will be able to come up with those answers.

Next, it's important to match the capabilities of the PR firm to the audiences which you are targeting. Trying to get TechCrunch and Mashable to pay attention? That's a different skill set than reaching out to Gartner or the New York Times. You'll want a PR firm that has proven adept with social media marketing. But don't expect that approach to work with the Times or the Journal.

But do the alternative media want to be pitched? Scoble argues that he'd prefer to find cool stuff on his own or through word of mouth. That may be cool but if you're going to wait around hoping your technology will be discovered through serendipity, you'll probably be disappointed. And most bloggers are happy to have ideas floated to them, as long as the ideas are relevant to the world that they cover. So, I think that PR plays a solid role in the web 2.0 world.

But can't you do this stuff yourself? In theory, of course. But most startups don't have the resources, the know how or the bandwidth to do this effectively. A good PR effort consists of an ongoing outreach program, where someone is calling, emailing or Tweeting a couple of hours every day. Do your senior executives have the time to make that commitment? I doubt it. I've also found that founders tend to think their pitch is a match to every reporter's needs but a PR pro knows not to pitch off-target messages.

The challenge for companies is in hiring the right firms and matching their capabilities to your needs. Yes, there are a lot of mediocre PR firms out there but the bigger problem, in my opinion, is hiring good people for the wrong projects. A big agency may not yet understand PR 2.0 and may also put first year associates on your account rather than the senior executives who came in for the pitch. A firm adept at social media strategies may not have the relationships to get you into the Times or the Journal. Define your requirements, set realistic goals and measure and monitor and you'll find that your PR dollars are a solid investment.

For more on effective PR for tech companies, read Brian Solis' PR Tips for Startups and follow David Meerman Scott's blog and read his New Rules of Marketing and PR.

UPDATE: Scoble talks about what he (and other bloggers) want from PR while PR pro Jeremy Popper tells bloggers to STFU.

Guardian Media Acquires PaidContent for $30 Million +

Congratulations to Rafat, Staci and the PaidContent team.
Kara at All Things D is reporting that UK-based Guardian Media Group has purchased the Content Next, parent of PaidContent for "north of $30 million".
PaidContent recently celebrated their fifth anniversary and has been a case study in how to develop a professional media blog, growing the business with multiple sites and adding events.
This reinforces what I've said previously about blogonomics. Expect more deals to come in the next 6-12 months, especially with the cheap dollar.

Update: PaidContent fills in the details.

the PaidContent team at last year's FOBM mixer at the Waldorf