Rocket Watcher: Product Marketing for Startups » Social Media

Pitching to Bloggers (and Journalists) – Tips for Startups

aprildunford — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 19:37:25 +0000

Most early stage startups don’t have the budget (or the desire) to hire a PR agency to help them get news coverage. Getting coverage for a startup is (in my opinion anyway) easier than it has ever been – there are loads of online publications that cover startups and they’re easy to find and contact. But as least favorite engineering prof used to say to me “April, just because I say it’s easy, doesn’t mean you can’t mess it up.”

Here’s my list of Do’s and Don’ts

Do This

Cultivate relationships before you need them – Did you ever have a friend that only called you when they wanted something? Don’t be that person. There’s generally a ton of runway pre-launch you can use to establish relationships with bloggers and journalists. Meeting face to face (at events, social gatherings, industry meetings, etc.) is always the best way but I’ve had good relationships that started out with me commenting a lot on their blogs, sharing their content, and linking to or blogging about their content on my company blogs. The goal is to get a better understanding of the person (what do they like/dislike, how can help them out, etc) at a stage when you aren’t asking for something.
Have something newsworthy to talk about – this isn’t just about having a great product, it’s about having a great story to tell that people will want to read about (and yes, great products make this easier). Why should people be excited about your news? How does it relate to other newsworthy things (market/buyer/cultural/economic trends for example) people are interested in? Most startups are great at tying their solutions to technology trends which works well for tech/startup publications. If you want more mainstream press your tie-in’s will need to be more mainstream. I talked to a startup recently that got good coverage tying their product news to the Occupy movement, and another that had a great story related to wedding planning that launched at the time of the royal wedding. You need to answer the question – why is your news interesting right now?
Pitch writers that are a good fit for your news – I’ve seen few examples where folks have been successful by blasting large lists with a generic pitch. Do your homework and understand what the writer covers, their likes and dislikes, whether or not they have written about other companies in similar markets and if so, what were the stories like. Build a personalized pitch that includes why you chose to pitch them specifically. If possible tailor your story angle for the publication or for them personally.
Make it as easy as possible – I like to have a media page that I can direct folks to where writers can get quick easy answers to basic questions (i.e. who/when/why was the company formed, who are the noteworthy employees/customers/partners/investors/advisors involved, what is the value the company delivers and to what markets) and get easy access to logos, screenshots, video, graphics etc. Write your press release so that it’s easy to copy sections from it to create a story (hard to believe but this happens more than you would think). Video and/or images (I seem to be the only person on the planet that’s sick of infographics) that compliment the story work well because they make it easy to create a visually interesting post.
Kiss butt (a little) – Just like regular folks, bloggers generally like working with people who are nice to them more than they like dealing with jackasses. In my opinion, putting a little sugar on it just helps move things along. Tell them you loved their most recent post, say thank-you when they cover you, send them a happy holidays note – this stuff seems simple but so few people do it that you will stand out when you do. Just be careful not to spread it on stalker-thick.

Try to Avoid This

Phoning people (or pestering them on social media) – What’s the definition of zero? The likelihood anyone will return your unsolicited phone call. I could have also said the probability that a blogger will pick up the phone when you cal,l but you get it. There’s a reason most folks don’t publish their phone numbers. Most publications have a preferred method of contact for pitches that they publish (usually a dedicated email address that is monitored) and going around it just annoys people. This goes for sending private messages to people over social media. Those channels are full of spam and using them when you don’t know the person makes you a spammer too.
Getting the names and/or genders wrong – My name isn’t Apple but I get a lot of email addressed to her. It’s hard to take people seriously after they have mistaken me for a fruit. Also confusing someone for a member of the opposite sex is just no way to start a relationship.

What am I missing?

Infographics – The Lindsay Lohan of Content?

aprildunford — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 12:00:29 +0000

I’m sick of infographics. I’m sad about it too because I used to love them. I was excited about the potential for infographics to help us get more visual in the way we communicated messages and told stories. Sadly this isn’t the way it played out. We got beautiful graphics alright. Lovely ones. But somewhere along the way Infographics became all about the look and the story was forgotten. They’ve become the web version of shouting “Hey look a rainbow!!” and we look, even though we know most of the time it’s a trick and there isn’t a rainbow there at all.

I’m worried that Infographics are becoming the Lindsay Lohan of content – People still click on the links to see the sordid photos but they stopped paying to see her movies a long time ago.

Let’s look at an example. Last week I came across this one – The Best and Worst of Marketing (if you built this, I’m sorry for picking on you but this post needs an example and unfortunately, you’re it)

Infographic by Marketing Degree

Does it look great? Sure it does.

Now what’s it trying to tell us? It lists the “best undergraduate marketing colleges.” In terms of what, you might wonder? Most difficult to get into? Most CMO graduates? We’ll never know because in teeny font at the bottom we see the list of sources which include such specific references as www.businessinsider.com and the website for the University of Pennsylvania. I supposes that’s how they made #1.

Moving along we see a list of best and worst paying marketing jobs. The best ones are a couple of Chief Marketing whatever jobs and then there are 3 Director level titles. Where are the Vice Presidents? Obviously we’re underpaid.

Then we have the best and worst marketing campaigns, best and worst marketing slogans and worst marketing slogan translations. Like there is a way to actually measure or rank any of that.

What is the story this graphic is trying to tell me? That if I don’t go to the University of Texas I run the risk of writing a slogan that translates into “it takes an aroused man to make a chicken affectionate” in Spanish? I have no idea. The graphic is a set of random marketing tidbits (I can’t even call them facts or data points) prettied up by a graphics person for the sole purpose of getting me to the page. It worked – I’m here. I’m here and I’m baffled.

Has it educated me? No. Has it inspired me? No. Did it make me want to take any sort of action at all? Nope. What we have here is a hot mess of “data” that doesn’t tell a story.

We Can Do Better

Don’t be me wrong – I don’t think all Infographics are terrible. There are some great ones out there. I’ve mentioned Eloqua’s Content Grid here before and it’s a good example of one that’s really useful and informative. I’ve used it a handful of times in the past month when I’ve been trying to describe how different types of content is relevant to different prospects at different stages of a deal.

(totally random aside – I loved Tufte’s Beautiful Evidence. Here’s a post where he highlights the work of Megan Jaegerman from the New York Times that was done over a decade ago. Again, I wonder where we went wrong on this stuff)

But for every graphic like that I get a dozen like this, or this, or this.

When our content becomes the equivalent of tabloid journalism, I’m sure we can generate clicks and some short-term attention. We all like looking at interesting pictures. But great content needs to inform, educate, motivate, inspire or enrage. If our content can’t do that then we’re no better off than the scandal-prone starlet who’s embarrassing photos still fetch a fee but can’t land a movie role because the audience no longer pays to see her movies.

In marketing terms what I’m saying is this – it’s nice you can drive some traffic with those pretty pictures but I don’t believe you are driving any business.

The Twitter Butterfly Effect

aprildunford — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 14:00:59 +0000

Over the past year I’ve had 2 interesting experiences where I’ve tweeted something that seemed insignificant at the time and those tweets went on to have a life of their own to the point where almost a year later they continue to pop up in the strangest places like evidence of some sort of bizarre Twitter Butterfly Effect. Here are 2 examples:

#1: The One Where I Land on BusinessWeek’s list of Top 15 Notable Twitterers with Kanye West, John Cusack, and Larry King

The most recent example of this was my inclusion on BusinessWeek’s “Notable Twitterers of 2010″. When I first saw the list I was amazed – there are only 15 people listed including Kanye West, Sarah Palin, Jonathan Schwartz, Bow Wow and ……me? Seriously?

My “tweet of note” gave me a clue of how I landed there. It’s a cheeky comment I made about Umair Haque’s interview with Twitter founder Evan Williams at South by Southwest Interactive back in March. There had been rumours that Twitter was going to make a big announcement at the show so expectations were high for the session. While there was an announcement, the details were thin and the format of the session (think fireside chat more than keynote talk) was pretty low on energy given it was hosted in front of a huge audience. People complained over Twitter (because that’s what audiences do these days, particularly at SxSW) including me with what BusinessWeek calls my “Tweet of Note”:

“I’ve seen more energy at a lawn bowling tournament”

The irony of someone using Twitter to criticize a session featuring the founder of Twitter is not lost on me so I get that if you were compiling a list of interesting Twitter moments you might go looking for one like that. But at the same time there were thousands of people in the room tweeting about the keynote. How does mine get chosen? You can’t see tweets that old on Twitter and although I’ve been told it’s possible with Google, my searches didn’t produce it.

However my search did return interesting results I didn’t expect. It turned out that that Tweet was featured in a handful of articles written about the talk (I never knew about them because they didn’t mention me or my twitter handle explicitly). One of those is a collection of comments about the keynote on Forbes.com. Following that link takes you to an article on CNN that mentions the tweet. Neither of these articles mention me by name but another on Business Insider shows a screen grab of the tweet with my Twitter name. As you can see from the tweets they list there, mine is the only one that doesn’t explicitly complain about Umair so it’s the one you would pick if the story you wanted to write was “Someone complains about Twitter founder on Twitter”. Bingo. So without my knowing it, my little random tweet had made its way from CNN to Forbes to BusinessWeek 9 months later. That’s quite a trip.

#2: The One Where I Complain About Electrical Outlets and End up on a Book Tour

Shortly after South by Southwest I was meeting someone at a cafe in Toronto. I wanted to show them something on my computer but my battery was dead. Everyone in the cafe was using a computer but there was exactly 1 outlet. I Tweet something like “what’s up with coffee shops where everyone has a computer but there are no outlets”, and I mention the name of the coffee shop. One thing leads to another and the person manning the Twitter account for the shop complains about me complaining about his shop on Twitter. The entire exchange is over in 5 minutes and we all go back to our respective tasks at hand.

Except witnessing the exchange is a social media consultant, Scott Stratten (aka @Unmarketing on Twitter) who does a lot of public speaking. He captures the tweets and starts using it as an example of how small businesses should not do customer service on Twitter. Then he writes a superfantastic book. On the publicity tour for the book he tells the story of my coffee shop exchange and for fun says to the audience “If you’re on Twitter go ahead and say hi to @AprilDunford, she loves it!” So now every week or so I get a flood of tweets saying “@Unmarketing says HI!!!” and a rash of new followers. Months after I typed it, my little tweet about outlets gets talked about not just on Twitter but at conferences, and bookstores and perhaps even (gasp!) coffee shops.

ASIDE: I plan to write my own superfantastic book, use Scott as an example in it, go on tour and flood his tweet stream with hundreds of “hey @AprilDunford said to say hi!” tweets. Yes, it will take years to execute on this plan and be tons of work but that’s exactly why it will be SO DARN FUNNY AND TOTALLY WORTH IT.

Your Tweets Belong to the World (and the World is Full of Reporters)

So what do we learn from stories like this? Maybe it’s that our Tweets belong to the world and the world is full of reporters (of one kind or another). Maybe. Or maybe the lesson is the same one my mother tried to teach me in grade six when she said “You better watch your smart mouth or something’s gonna happen!” Always listen to your mother.

CEO’s and Social Media: Opportunity or Threat?

aprildunford — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 14:00:18 +0000

Last week I did an interview with Canadian Business on the subject of social media and CEO’s. The reporter asked me this question (I’m paraphrasing):

“But shouldn’t you be worried that your CEO might say something that has a negative effect on the company? What if he/she does something offensive in public?”

I can understand why people would worry about things like that but frankly it’s a doomsday scenario that just hasn’t played out even though social media continues it’s march into the mainstream. Can you name me a single example of a CEO that has gotten into serious trouble because of their use of social media?

Not that I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I can give you dozens of examples where a CEO has put his/her foot in their mouth in traditional media so why would social media be any different? We don’t question that our CEO’s should engage with traditional media (even though there are risks), because we understand the benefits. While I don’ t believe that every CEO should have their own blog or Twitter account, I do believe that every company should have a social media presence of some sort and that the CEO should occasionally use that forum to share their views with the world. Like traditional media, the benefits far outweigh the risks in my opinion.

The full text of the article is here.

What do you think?

If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/managing/employees/article.jsp?content=20101122_10035_10035

Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing)

aprildunford — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 11:00:23 +0000

a bunch of happy campers

Can we upgrade you to a ballroom? Yes please!

I gave the keynote presentation at ProductCamp Amsterdam over the weekend. It was an amazing trip. The intelligent and charming organizers (shown in the photo left to right Xavier, Vladimir, Mark, Jelmer, and Kevin) not only shuttled me around and fed me good food but they also put me up in by far the largest hotel room I have ever stayed in (below is a shot I took from the loft. Yes, it had a loft). The venue (kindly donated by the folks at Backbase) was fantastic and the crowd was full of smart startup folks that asked really good questions.

The talk I gave was one that I’ve wanted to do for a while. It was on the changing nature of marketing in a world where buyers are much more in control and traditional marketing tactics are not only ineffective, but down right annoying. The talk is called Marketing is Dead (long live Product Marketing).

I want to thank the organizers again for inviting me and for being such good hosts. And if there are any other European conference organizers out there reading this I’d like to say that in addition to Amsterdam I like London, Paris and Berlin very much….

Here are the slides:

Marketing is Dead (long live product marketing)

View more presentations from April Dunford.

If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Brand Marketing has Left the Building

aprildunford — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 13:00:19 +0000

Last week I attended Marketo’s User Conference and I had a great time being elbow-to-elbow with 600 other hard-core marketing folk (if you don’t know them, Marketo provides a marketing automation tool that helps marketers automate lead generation campaigns). One of the themes of the conference was around the transformation of marketing from a cost center to a revenue driver. Phil Fernandez, Marketo’s CEO had this to say in a recent blog post:

In today’s “buyer’s in control” market, traditional marketing and sales approaches have become grossly inefficient and outdated. By relying on antiquated strategies and ineffective methods, organizations find that 80% of leads and 50% of the sales team time is wasted. This misalignment adds up quickly and creates significant revenue leaking points across the organization.

The solution to this “revenue leakage” requires a shift in thinking about marketing’s fundamental role in the business. This shift moves marketing further and further away from doing more traditional “branding” style activities, toward campaigns and tactics where there is a direct line of sight to revenue.

Why is this shift from brand marketing to revenue marketing happening in the first place?

Digital makes measurement possible - Digital marketing has made it possible for marketers to measure more of what we do. 10 years ago when I was spending my money on print advertising, traditional PR and events it was hard to track the amount of revenue I influenced. Because it was hard to measure we often allocated marketing spend across tactics based on anecdotal information. We took a guess at what worked based on how many people we got in front of and not how many folks actually took action. Now for the majority of the tactics I run, I can tell you exactly what actions we drove in terms of numbers of clicks, form fills, opportunities and revenue. Using a tool like Marketo I can track which prospects received my emails, opened them, clicked on links, downloaded content, how many times they visited my website, what search terms they used to find my site and what they looked at once they got there. And it’s not just me that can see that – my sales team can see it and use it to better prioritize what they are doing. Why on earth would I want to spend money on tactics where I didn’t have that level of visibility into results?

Marketing is being asked to be more accountable – in my opinion, as digital marketing became more popular and executives began to see that it was possible to measure the results of these types of campaigns, it got people thinking about how they might measure everything else. Historically most companies typically had two types of marketing programs they were running – lead generation programs that were measured in terms of pipeline generated and branding programs meant to drive awareness that were either not measured at all or measured in a way where it was impossible to attribute a shift in awareness to any single activity. Now, if you were a CEO and had to choose between spending money on things you knew were driving revenue and things you weren’t so sure about, which would you choose? It’s no wonder we aren’t brand marketing like we used to.

Revenue and Respect for Marketing

One of my favorite quotes of the conference came from Jon Miller, Marketo’s VP of Marketing. In his talk he spoke about the respect and credibility he has earned from his executive team by being able to predict at the beginning of the quarter how much revenue he can drive by the end of the quarter. He said,

Now when I show up at the executive meeting I’m not the arts and crafts guy, I’m the revenue guy

What do you think – are you still the arts and crafts person at your company?

If you enjoyed that, you should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Influencers Suck

aprildunford — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 05:05:21 +0000

This post is a cautionary tale for marketers thinking about running influencer campaigns. It’s harder than it looks.

Virgin America and Klout did an influencer campaign in Toronto to promote Virgin’s new Toronto to San Francisco route. Klout is a tool that measures how “influential” a person is on Twitter. Influential Twitter users were offered a free flight to California and invited to a party to be attended by Sir Richard Branson himself. I was selected as one of those lucky folks. At first I thought the campaign was a stroke of marketing genius. Do something really remarkable for a bunch of noisy people and you can pretty much guarantee that we will tell everybody we know about it. Oh, if only life were so simple. That’s the dirty secret of marketing – ideas are easy, it’s the execution that’s tricky.

As you might expect, folks not offered free flights complained about the selection criteria, the tool, and that Klout was “buying Tweets”. More invitations were issued and word spread that complaining about not getting invited might actually get you invited, spawning an additional wave of complaining. Influencers who did not register for the party within a 1.5 hour window were un-invited. More complaining. At the pre-party meetup, Klout employees didn’t seem to know any of the chosen influencers and a distracted Klout employee walked away from guests mid-conversation. Complaining. The launch party invite email had errors. Complaining. Influencers were not VIP enough to enter the VIP area at the party. Complaining. Each misstep was very minor but taken together, a campaign that had started out with great buzz devolved into a Twittter complain-a-palooza. I last saw the Klout folks huddled together at the launch party and none of them made a move to talk to the group of influencers a few steps away. Given we were likely to complain about that as well, I couldn’t blame them.

It Sucks Dealing with Cranky-Pants Influencers (but you still have to do it)

In fact, I felt badly for them. They DID do a lot of things right. They were open about how they selected people and published a blog post on it. They directly communicated that accepting the gift did not mean you were obliged to talk about it and they advised people to disclose that they had received the gift if they wrote about it. Their tool in my opinion, is by far the best way of measuring true reach and interaction on Twitter and they are pretty explicit on their site about what they are measuring and why. It might not be perfect but this is a startup we’re talking about here, not IBM research labs and in this case I don’t think perfection is possible. The tool is blazing a trail in uncharted territory which, for those of you that have never done that, is really, really hard. The tool is also improving at a remarkably rapid rate from what I’ve seen.

But as my father would say “you can’t sell if you can’t deal with the public” and this particular brand of public is famous for being critical of companies that do not appear to understand or value their community. Trying to influence any group of people is hard work. If that group happens to be heavy social media users, I would argue it’s harder still. But it isn’t impossible. Here are a few examples (featuring folks that would make my Toronto “influential” list):

1/ Working with a Community

I witnessed Erin Bury, community manager for Sprouter, work her magic at the blogger lounge at SxSW this year. Within an hour she had met everyone in the room and when I say “met”, I don’t mean forking over a business card. She asked smart questions, listened, and probed for ways she or her company could help people. She Tweeted thank-you’s to folks for taking the time to talk and later Sprouter featured some of those people in their newsletter and blog. Erin doesn’t have free flights to give away but she wins people over by giving her time, her help and her respect.

2/ Running an Influencer Event

I attended a Rogers blogger event organized by Dave Fleet and the folks at Thornley Fallis (disclosure: I don’t work for TF but I have freeloaded office space from them). I was greeted when I arrived and people I hadn’t met yet knew who I was. Everyone working the event spoke to me and asked questions. The event was well-staffed and we all got a chance to spend as much time as we wanted with Rogers people. We were given a Twitter hashtag and Tweeted like mad. Loads of time was set aside to let us ask questions and the Rogers folks seemed open to feedback. On the way out everyone thanked me for coming. Nobody complained and they made it look easy. You try running a blogger event for a phone company and not have anyone complain. It’s not easy.

3/ Dealing with Criticism

If you’re on Twitter you likely follow @unmarketing. Scott Stratten is a speaker and consultant with a book on the way. He’s a one-man Twitter university for folks trying to figure it out and he teaches with wit and humility. He’s famous and like all famous people, he’s got detractors. People have gone so far as to create anonymous Twitter accounts for the sole purpose of picking on him. So what does Scott do? He tries to understand and where there is nothing he can do, he sucks it up. He’s nice to everyone and engages with everyone, even people who don’t return the favor, but if folks cross the line or are immovably anti-@unmarketing, he’ll directly and openly tell them to scram and ignore them. He maintains the difficult balance between being open to feedback and “feeding the trolls.” He does remarkably little complaining about @unmarketing haters while he continues to do his (clearly working) thing.

So for you marketers thinking about running influencer campaigns, consider yourselves warned. It’s harder than it looks. As for Klout I’m sure they will iron out the kinks and learn from the experience like all good startups. I’m a big fan of the tool and I’d like them to be successful. And maybe the next time they visit Toronto we will be less cranky. Maybe. Yeah, probably not. Influencers suck.

Oh and if any of you readers are in San Francisco July 25th to 28th, let me know, I’d love to have coffee

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Content Marketing and “Trusted Advisors”

aprildunford — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 12:07:19 +0000

In many larger organizations, professional services consultants and sales folks are trained to become “trusted advisors” to their accounts. To attain this status, account managers need to demonstrate a deep understanding of the customer’s environment and pains and offer valued advice and support. It strikes me that this is exactly the goal of a great content marketing strategy.

Why? Because Lead Development is Happening Without You

Traditional lead development is a process where prospects are ushered along a path where they are fed increasingly detailed information about a company’s offering until they are ready to make a purchase, at which point they are handed over to sales. The problem with this process however is that people don’t like to be sold to and traditional lead development looks an awful lot like selling. So prospects avoid coming to vendors for information as much as they can, and today, getting the information they need (from forums, blogs, through online networks of their peers, independent review sites, etc.) is easier than it’s ever been. In many cases, prospects are entering the lead flow process far more sales ready than they’ve ever been, which begs the question – how many opportunities for lead development are companies missing altogether?

The Trusted Advisor Approach and Content Marketing

How do you do hands-off or low-touch lead development? The same way sales has been doing it through becoming trusted advisors. Rather than selling to prospects, you help them.

Prospects have problems to solve. They are looking for information that helps them understand what their options are. They need to learn the different approaches to solving the problem. they will need to understand industry terms and possibly some technology that they aren’t familiar with. They will research best practices and look at how other companies like theirs have solved the problem in the past. they want to understand how things can go wrong and how to avoid that.

Great content can provide all of the above. Through blog posts, webinars, e-books, video, customer testimonials and a host of other types of content, marketing can provide truly helpful information that prospects actually want. This content helps to give you permission to interact with prospects who would otherwise try hard to avoid you until later in the buying process.

This is Not About Products or Thought Leadership

This is not about providing product information. Like the trusted advisor sales approach, the goal is to first establish credibility by sharing your knowledge and experience. Once you have proved that you can help a prospect solve their problems, they are much more likely to ask for you help on problems that your products/services can solve and you then have permission to “sell” to them.

This is also not about “thought leadership”. Thought leadership (in my mind anyway) is more about having an opinion and point of view on what’s happening in the industry that gives people an indication of where it’s headed. Thought leaders aren’t necessarily “helpful” per se because they don’t generally give you information you can act on today. For example I would consider Seth Godin to be a marketing thought leader but his books, although exceptionally thought-provoking, don’t give you a roadmap of how to get from where you are to where he thinks things are going. On the other hand, if you needed a VC pitch template and I gave you one, you likely wouldn’t call me a thought leader but you’d probably find me helpful (and you might come back and ask me for more advice on how to pitch a potential investor). Thought leadership content is important to demonstrate vision but I don’t believe it’s enough to develop trust with a potential client.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Product Marketing & Social Media Skills: Talk is Cheap

aprildunford — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 12:00:21 +0000

Question: I’m hiring a product marketer and I want great social media skills. All the candidates tell me that they have those skills but most of them don’t have much of a presence online. Does that matter? Do you need to be a heavy social media user in order to really understand it?

The Short Answer: Yes you do.

The Longer Answer: You do because:

A/ Marketing execution is much harder than theory. Social media isn’t much different from a lot of other classic product marketing skills – the theory isn’t all that tricky, it’s the execution that’s hard. If you wanted to hire someone to launch a new product into market, you’d talk to people who have done it before. Taking the course or reading the book doesn’t count for that much. Practical experience in product marketing counts for a lot. I read an awful lot of press releases before I started writing them and I was still lousy at it until I’d done it a few times. My first couple of integrated marketing campaigns were, ah, shall we say, less than perfect.

Social Media isn’t any different. I thought blogging was pretty easy until after my first (largely failed) attempt at running a group blog for a previous employer. I’m a better blogger now than I was even a year ago (I’m not saying I’m great, wise-apples, just better than last year). I don’t think I would have wanted to follow me when I first started using Twitter. I understood Facebook much better after my first attempt to do a company fan page and many of the things that in theory should have worked, didn’t and vice versa. It’s hard to know how you are going to react to a Troll online until you’ve been attacked by one. Experience counts for a lot. If you’re hiring a person to blog, use Twitter, do things on Facebook, participate in forums, etc. you’d be best to go with a candidate that has done than stuff, rather than a person who’s just watching from the sidelines.

B/ You Can’t Fake Passion. I had a boss that asked candidates in interviews to “sell” him whatever electronic gadget they had on them (cell phone, music player, laptop). What he was looking for was passion for technology. His quote was “If they aren’t excited about a piece of technology that they bought themselves then they won’t ever be able to get people excited about our stuff.” People that are passionate about social media aren’t participating because their boss told them to, they’re doing it because they think it’s really interesting and fun. If your candidates aren’t at least fooling around with this technology by now, I would question whether they will ever really get excited about it.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe! You can sign up for email updates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.

Twitter: Is Marketing Doing it Wrong?

aprildunford — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 12:41:17 +0000

Marketers love Twitter these days for a list of reasons including using it converse with customers and influencers, sharing content and driving traffic to websites. There has been so much talk about Twitter in Marketing circles, you would think that everyone would have it figured out by now. I’m not claiming to be a Twitter expert but I have been a fairly heavy user for the past couple of years and here are a few things I see folks doing that I believe are just wrong:

1/ Focusing on followers instead of engagement – Social Media folks have been saying “it’s about the conversation” over and over for years now but this is still a stumbling block for a large number of marketers. There are plenty of tools out there that for a fee, will follow people based on keywords, unfollow those that don’t return the favor and follow some more until you have thousands of followers. That’s great, right? It is if your only goal is to try to impress people (who know nothing about Twitter) with the number of followers you have. If your goal however is to drive some awareness or action, 15,000 followers could well be the same as 100 if none of your 15,000 ever talks to you or shares your stuff. There are some interesting tools coming to market to judge how “influential” a Twitter user actually is. Klout seems to be the most sophisticated out there, creating a score that takes into account how often people respond to you or share things you’ve posted and how influential those people are. Topsy (the folks that power the retweet button on this blog) is also measuring how influential folks are by tracking how often they are cited in other people’s Tweets. People should stop bragging about the number of followers they have – it’s easy to buy followers therefore the number is meaningless.

2/ Broadcasting instead of interacting – I’m not saying you can’t share your own stuff on Twitter, you can. I never post a blog post without Tweeting about it a couple of times because frankly, if I cared enough to spend the time writing it down, I generally care enough to share it. Where this doesn’t work however, is when that’s ALL you are doing. It becomes like advertising, and by that I mean boring and really easy to ignore. Yeah, I get that this works for Mashable but chances are, you and your company are nothing like Mashable. You are going to have to do a whole lot more listening and talking to be taken seriously within a community and that means interacting and being helpful instead of just pitching and selling.

3/ Ignoring people that are trying to talk to you – Sure you might get away with this if you are Ashton but what amazes me is when regular old tech folks, or worse, people representing companies ignore people. I’ve had this happen to me more than a few times and every time it does, I’m perplexed and annoyed. Why don’t they want to talk to people? Do they think we won’t notice that we are being ignored and be mad about that? I can see missing a few messages (it happens to me) but I’ve seen many users that only interact with a small group and pretend the rest of us don’t exist. I do exist. I exist and not only will I unfollow you, I will mock you and your lousy social skills over drinks for the next 6 months. If you’re Ashton, that might not matter. If you are a regular person like the rest of us, (even a somewhat well-known one) it might not kill your brand but at a minimum you are missing out on an opportunity to expand your community.

Hey, you made it all the way to the end! You should subscribe! You can sign up for emailupdates, subscribe via RSS or follow me on Twitter.