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Yes, yes, I know. Your customers are far too busy and intelligent to use social media and, even if they do, they do not use it for business-related activity. That’s an inaccurate belief. More than two-thirds of the population of North America and Europe are actively involved in social media on a daily basis, which means it is highly likely that your customer base does use at least one medium every day. Two bits of information came out in some conversations today regarding how to optimize search for your website. Most of the conversations were around a report on Search Engine Land where Andrey Lipattsev, a Search Quality Senior Strategist at Google, confirmed what the Google algorithms look for in search engine rankings. Here are the two most important activities you can do, based on my understanding: Engaging content is the most important thing for SEO Links back to your site The first activity is all under your control. You identify and create the content on your site and if it is se...

If you walk into a business event with a thousand people and you stand in a corner the entire night not engaging with anyone, the event is useless to you. Same with social media platforms. You only get the value back that you put into the participation. The input on my concern about Linkedin’s future has created a massive response in the past week. More than 30 comments in my Linkedin post a nd a couple hundred direct messages and emails. All of the input is consistent. While comments range from power users who say the will continue to be power users, to those that say they are leaving Linkedin altogether, but the consistently say that the level of SPAM is increasing, which makes the platform more difficult to use. So today I’d like to talk about techniques to eliminate the SPAM and make Linkedin useful for you. If you walk into a business event with a thousand people and you stand in a corner the entire night not engaging with anyone, the event is useless to you. Same with social med...

Had a chat with Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute today about how well content marketing is doing in US business Had a chat with Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute today about how well content marketing is doing in US business.  Of course we've all heard the glowing reports, but it turns out that the success is still very limited to only those that are doing it right.  And there aren't many of them at that.  Gee, who knew?  Here's the discussion.   Related articles Why some people don't want to tell their story Content Marketing All-Stars: Q&A with Joe Pulizzi Epic Content Marketing - Joe Pulizzi Think twice before discounting print as part of your marketing mix.

They are creating 20th century content, stuffing it into web 2.0 sites and putting links to social platforms so lots of people can see how god-awful their stuff is. When I was a young journalist, I worked for the managing editor from Hell.  I'd write a story, turn it in, he'd cuss under his breath, crumple it up and say, "Do it again."   He'd never tell me what was wrong with it, because he said he really didn't know, so he gave me no good direction.  I went through that for 18 months and was on the verge of being fired every month.  Talk about a gaunlet.  But after those 18 months I started to see what he saw and my copy started getting better.  Much better.  And I could explain what made a story good or bad, which came in handy for new reporters who started to go through the gauntlet.  Because I could help them, they became better faster, which made the paper better overall.  I went from becoming a crappy...

  To sum up our series today on the death of journalism as we know it, there is less and less independent analysis from the free press due to budgetary constraints.  Consumers are relying more and more on online content, especially video , to make their decisions but they still want objective content.  Businesses that understand this are turning to ethical journalism and sponsoring it directly to establish themselves as trusted sources of content.  The tech world is taking baby steps in this direction.  Xilinx and Altera hired former print journalists to manage in-house publications sent to current customers.  Cadence Design took a step further hired a journalist to manage blog content specifically to promote the companies products and services, but the efforts focus only on current customers. Larger companies, like Pepsi , offer a section of the website devoted only to pop culture, not products.  Digikey , in contrast, offers industry news...

Just read an interesting post in ReadWrite about Mark Cuban deciding to abandon Facebook because of the algorithm change forcing corporations to pay exorbitant fees to get play on the social network.  Frankly, I think he's wrong to do it, but Facebook is finally doing something right. The great thing about Facebook, as opposed to Google, was that companies could get a lot of good exposure if they could get their customers to talk about what they thought about products.That's why I was an initial FB booster rather than press releases on Google  as a means to reach an audience. It was true public relations, not companies gaming the SEO of Google for a higher page rank.  In the beginning, it worked well.  Then companies got lazy, and so did Facebook, by creating corporate pages and finding ways to game the community attraction, just like Google allowed.  I was really getting sick of having to completely reorder my FB feed to keep the crappy fa...

 Today I... Helped a young entrepreneur in Qatar refine his executive summary on a social media app designed to help charities raise money. ( Linkedin ) Conducted a staff meeting ( Skype ) and reviewed documents and reports with the team in Boston and Austin ( Dropbox ) Encouraged a young friend in Washington state who was in a sudden moment of crisis. ( Facebook ) Finished editing a series of videos to help local voters work their way through the California ballot without using divisive campaign rhetoric. (Youtube) Helped someone adjust their security settings on Facebook so she wasn’t blasting everything about her life to everyone on the web. (Facebook) Suggested several candidates for a senior communications executive to a major semiconductor company identify. (Talent.me) Put the early workings together for a fund raising project to help teacher take care of their cars. (Causes.com) Set up a video channel to broadcast my daughter’s wedding to people who cannot attend. (Ustre...

For those who have not discovered him yet, Brian Solis is a social media guru who has turned the medium into a science.  If you can, pick up his book Engage ! and read it with a bottle of aspirin nearby, because you'll have a headache about a third of the way in.  Ever since I discovered him he regulalrly posts an explanation of something that has been noodling around in my brain.  It's kind of scary actually. For example, today he posts a piece about infographics  (that are all the rage now) and explains why they are so badly done in general. He asks,  "Are you trying to seek the embrace of your customers and the people who influence them or are you designing for those who will approve and fund your campaign?" In that simple question he wraps up about 6 months of discussions I've had with companies about developing shareable, engaging content.  I morphed my business out of PR a couple of years ago into whate we called a strat...

Continuing on with our discussion about good content, I've come across some fascinating data regarding how customers in the world of semiconductor design are consuming it and what it means for social media.  Let's start with a poll taken by a company I've been consulting to in recent weeks. The company wanted to get some attention from a select segment of customers.  The company estimates that their entire customer base consists of a few thousand people worldwide and they only need to reach a small part of that to be successful.  So they were looking into ways to best reach them.  Good content was a given in their estimation, but how to create that content and how to deliver it most efficiently was the question.  They had an assumption on what would be the best path that I questioned so I asked them to do something: talk to your current and potential customer about where they get their information. I've asked my clients to do this for many y...

Continuing on with our discussion on what makes good content, I want to give a big shout-out to Don Tuite from Electronic Design who provided, in a comment with an outstanding example of what it takes to make a good technical news story. Don pointed out that when he does a piece, he does a fair amount of editorializing, but that is tempered by a lot of information from many sources.  That speaks to the issue if truth in content.  An opinion is not necessarily untrue and passes the test when it is backed up by information from both sides.  To get to that point, however, requires a helluva lot of work. Don's outline of his process took not only days of research and discussion, but time to put it straight in his own head and then write down his perception of reality.  If lucky, he gets to do that 20 or 30 times a year.  There are about 5 editors in the industry like Don so we can count on about 150 stories with that kind of effort over the course of a yea...

 A few weeks ago I started a discussion on Facebook on what goes into the creation of good content and that turned into the first in a series that ensued from the discussion.  Don Tuite of Electronic Design magazine asked an interesting question regarding what makes a piece of content "truthy," an adjective created by comedian Steven Colbert .  that question is a perfect example of what is wrong with content development today: the effort to make something seem true rather than try to make sure it is actually true.   Tom Foremski wrote an interesting piece over on ZDNet on press-imposed censorship that fits in well as an example of what hampers the creation of good content. Foremski talks about the habit of B2B journalists to continually go to the well of what they consider "reliable" sources that invariably consist of the top players in a given industry.  I've pointed out it past posts that every journalist has subjective filters...

Good content has to be about something you know, and that cuts out 99 percent of the stuff in social media. My last post on content as the driver of successful online programs got a relatively lively discussion over on my Facebook page and young Anton Molodetskiy (rhymes with "my broken jet ski") at the Hoffman Agency suggested I follow up with a post on what makes content "sharable."  Then a long time compatriot, Don Tuite (the analog guru at Electronic Design magazine ) tossed out a bunch of questions. "What about content nobody can find because it only shows up on page 10 of the search results? What about content that isn't true, but is truthy? If content is crowd-sourced, is it true? What makes for a 'trusted source.'?" So, at the risk of giving away the store, because helping companies do this is my business, it's probably a good idea to get into this.  Let's start with Don's last question. First, good content has t...

There was a significant kerfuffle last week as General Motors' pulled their advertising from Facebook, with prognosticators pointing to the failure of Facebook as a marketing tools.  Having been recently in the market for a new car, and having bought a GM car in the end, I can say with certainty that GM's use of Facebook advertising really sucked.  And Ford's was much better. Once I started online research for my car I started noticing ads for car manufacturers popping up on FB.  I noticed that GM ads were pretty standard.  Essentially, they said, "buy our car."  I was not impressed.  Then there was this one ad I found that didn't even mention who it was from.  It was a link to an article about the raw materials that go into electric vehicles.  I was considering EVs so I clicked on it.  It took me to a another manufacturers site, but not an ad. it was actually an article about the raw materials used in EVs. ...

In a continuation of my effort to catch up, EBN EiC Bolaji Ojo tipped me over the edge again bolstering my position, tangentially, my last post . Ojo, and his partner in crime at EBN, Barbara Jorgensen addressed the product of not doing social media right: Site Fatigue . "Each week," he wrote, "I receive a deluge of requests to Like companies on Facebook, follow tweets on Twitter, or be LinkedIn with others. Don't ask me to follow your tweets if they aren't worth following. Don't ask me to tag or recommend you if I can't justify the investment of my time." Which has been my point for many years.  Social media is not about mass marketing communication.  It's about building relationships and trust.  If you are posting links to poorly written and repetitive press releases and marcom material (that's pretty much everyone) then you are not using social media properly or even efficiently.  You're just pissing people off....

Over the past few weeks I've been wrapping up the beta project for our new business model and, as a result, I've been putting off a lot of writing.  So for the next few posts I'm going to be cleaning up the flotsam and jetsam that's accumulated on my desk.  First off, Infographics The recent web fad of reducing an argument to a trite graphic is really irritating to me... especially when the position taken is so poorly researched that it negates the senders' credibility. I usually only comment directly back to the sender about the error, but back in March I got an unsolicited email (from someone who did not identifiy what axe they wanted to grind but I was able to discover it anyway) asking me to comment on it in my blog.  Here's my comment. What a load of crap. Here's the infographic.   Via: Open-Site.org Right from the beginning the hucksters pushing this information start out with a prevarication: that Wikipedia forced Encyclopedia B...

We live in a world that lacks both barriers and trust. While the rest of the world watches and shares what the corporate world and press produce, most of the producers are still trying to put some level of control on it. That is not going to change. Someone has to stand up and tackle the problem from a different angle. In our last post in this series I stated that earned content isn't a sure thing no matter how much effort and cost you put into it.  That's because earned content -- news coverage that is beneficial to your cause, product or company -- has too many variable in the form of timing, resources within the news community and the interest of the general reading public.  Because of that confluence of variables, most companies don't approach public relations strategically but keep it in the tactical menu.  That's also why most PR efforts fail to impress the people that pay for them.  That is not to say that earned media cannot be a strat...

Social and earned media content is seen as truer because it is uncontrolled and has the perspective of the third party. Whether it comes from a known journalist or from the comments on a Facebook post, the readers know, in the least, that the author is not on your payroll. That provides a level of objectivity and even integrity that doesn't exist in an advertisement or corporate website.  Last post we looked at "suspect content" that is distributed over owned and paid media.  It's suspect to the audience because it is highly controlled and partisan.  Today we look at the "trustworthy content" that is found in earned media.  Social and earned media content is seen as truer because it is uncontrolled and has the perspective of the third party.  Whether it comes from a known journalist or from the comments on a Facebook post, the readers know, in the least, that the author is not on your payroll.  That provides a level of object...

I've come to realize that, while many companies engage in the various forms of media, very few know they should interrelate and even fewer understand how they interrelate. Let's see if we can fix that for some of you.  Happy New Year and welcome to our first series of the year.  Anyone in marketing knows the three primary buckets of media : paid, owned (or controlled) and earned.  Many in marketing know that social (or shared) media is a hybrid of owned and earned. Over the past year since we launched our inaugural strategic media program, however, I've come to realize that, while many companies engage in the various forms of media, very few know they should interrelate and even fewer understand how they interrelate.  Let's see if we can fix that for some of you.  Footwasher Media approaches media and content on a scale of trustworthy to suspect.  On the trustworthy side of the scale is earned, followed by social.  On the opposite end o...

Been having some interesting discussions with social media marketing/techdev types the past few weeks and I've come to realize that the SM industry is about as inbred as an industry can get.  That's not good.  Here's the background: I am still very tied into the old media world through very deep relationships.  I have good friends that not only work for newspapers, they own them.  5 years ago these friends saw they businesses crumbling but they still thought there was a chance to turn it around and the SM was just a fad.  Today it is quite different.  They understand they were wrong now, but they still don't understand how to put it into the context of their audience... because the SM industry doesn't care about context.  They care about selling stuff... through relationships.  In other words, an industry built on Amway marketing philosophy. But that's not what social media is supposed to be about.  SM is abou...

OK, I’m a little behind it wrapping up this discussion.  Things are really getting crazy around here.  A couple of weeks ago I started talking about how SEO is not your biggest concern with your website and then followed up with how social networks followed that up with creating target audiences.  My premise is that both of the automated egalitarian technologies are being gamed by companies and building a basic distrust within their audiences.  I wrapped up my last post with: “So we are entering into another cycle; one that will be difficult for the current players to understand.  It is a cycle that will be based on ethics and trust and it is something that cannot be generated by an algorithm.” We’re going to build on that today. Trust is at the core of all genuine communication.  Once that goes out the window so does the communication.  That’s why search worked for a while because it wasn’t in the hands of the marketing department... until th...