Month: April 2009

By Posted on Posted in Customer Service as Marketing, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , ,

When a lot of people think of crowd-sourcing–harnessing the network of common wisdom–they probably think first of Wikipedia, which is written by its users. But Wikipedia, and Wikis in general, are only the most visible piece of an amazing phenomenon that dates back to the earliest days of the Net. Maybe eight or ten years ago, I was interviewed in some publication about how to get support and problems-solving for free or very low cost. And I described, among other things, how I got technical support from my then-most-current social media strategy: e-mail discussion groups.

It’s usually easy to find an informed and intelligent group of people who are delighted to answer your question. Online communities have been solving people’s problems for several decades. The form keeps evolving–from BBSs to -L listservs to yahoogroups, and now, to communities like Twitter, groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, etc. But just as TV did not replace radio and radio did not replace print, this is an additive process; the old ways still work.

Just today, I ran into a problem with my home phone somehow forwarding to my business line. I didn’t set this up and couldn’t figure out how to turn it off. So I posted on Twitter, and a few minutes later, I had the answer. But I also have an issue with Amazon.com’s Advantage program, and I won’t look for the answer on Twitter or Facebook. I’m going to be asking on the two yahoogroups publishing discussion lists I follow. I expect I’ll find the answer. Knowing which audience makes sense for which kinds of questions makes a difference. And it also makes a difference if you consistently provide value to others within the community; people will be much more helpful if you’re seen as one of the “good guys.”

So…with all this free consulting (not to mention free information on the Web, already posted)…why do people still need consultants? Simple: Responses on social networks are typically off-the-cuff, general advice that may or may not be relevant to a specific situation. Even if someone spends 20 or 30 minutes answering a question, that person doesn’t know your specific situation, and won’t be expected to go into depth. In fact, social networks are an excellent way to demonstrate that you know what you’re talking about, so that when people do need to go deeper, they turn to you.

Yes, this really works; I’ve actually built my business on it. And just as an example of the free-to-fee model, I’ve given you the skeleton here. If you want to know the nuts and bolt, I have various infoproducts that can help, including my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Politics, Web 2.0/Social Media

I read a very interesting article called “How to Weather a Twitterstorm“–and one of the most interesting parts was the comments, which included a whole lot of people who basically said that Twitter, Facebook and other social media are a marginal part of the overall audience, and kowtowing to them is a mistake.

I wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss Twitter, et al. They have influence beyond their numbers, and there’s certainly precedent for stories leaping out of niche social media into the mainstream, with major consequences. Just ask Dan Rather about the fake memo about Bush’s military service that cost several key staffers their jobs and forced Rather into premature retirement. I have been a deep critic of Bush (and a fan of Rather), but when I saw the memo reproduced online, I knew there was no way it could be authentic. It was done on a modern word processor.

In my view, the article’s author, Abbey Klaassen, is more on target. she offers strategies to evaluate, contain, and appropriately respond to online criticism.

The point is critical that you want to acknowledge and contain the problem, and do so rapidly. And Twitter can be a great tool for this. Smart companies are finding ways to build their brand on Twitter, and one of the best is to be open to criticism while finding effective ways to defuse it. The Twitter page for Comcastcares is a great example of this. It’s all about customer service for cable TV customers with technical problems.

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By Posted on Posted in Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Mari Smith is a brilliant young marketer who has absolutely seized the reins of Facebook and Twitter and become a social media rock star. We had a conversation a couple of years ago when I was keynoting a conference she was attending, and she was the one who finally pushed me over the edge to get set up on Facebook. I’d already been on several other social networks without any visible results, but under Mari’s guidance, I found Facebook indeed quite useful.

Yesterday, Mari put up a great new blog post that I really like, jumping on the news that Oprah has begun Twittering and featured Twitter (and actor Ashton Kutcher, who is the first Twitterer to have a million people following his tweets–and in just a couple of days, has jumped to 1,201,192–that’s another 200,000 people! Most people have fewer than 500 total) on a recent episode.

Mari issued a call to become a “conscious twitterer.” That’s been my approach all along, and I’m delighted that Mari has given it a name.

Speaking of conscious social media: this blog is likely to be pretty quiet the next ten days. I’m leaving the country and made a “conscious” decision to leave my laptop behind. I do have one post queued up for later in the week, just to keep the search engines from thinking I’ve abandoned it.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , ,

Okay, we all know the usual places to put money are performing pretty badly right now. But get this: the Empire State Building is embarking on a massive energy retrofit that will return nearly 28 percent a year! The project will cost $13.2 million, not exactly chump change–but will slash energy consumption by 35 to 40 percent, and save $3.8 million a year (considerably more, if energy costs spike back up again). After the third year, that’s nearly $4 million going directly to the bottom line. If the improvements have even a 20-year lifespan, that $13.2 million investment would return $176 million, and that’s with stable energy prices. The number is much, much higher if you factor in average energy cost increases of 5 percent a year. (I’m not going to do the math here, because I don’t know all the factors we’d need to compute–but it’s sure to be at least $200 million, maybe much more).

Too bad we can’t put our Roth IRAs into renewable-energy retrofits .

Meanwhile, we can all learn from the creative thinking at Rocky Mountain Institute, which is doing the heavy lifting on this project–for example, remanufacturing the windows on-site to reduce trucking costs in fuel and money. For years, RMI has been generating this kind of holistic, big-picture energy planning that saves many times the cost, and quickly. I profile RMI founder Amory Lovins in my award-winning sixth book, Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Energy & Sustainability, Frugality/Frugal Fun, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

Unbelievably stupid quote from the agrochemical trade group Mid America Croplife Association, whose members include the likes of Monsanto, Dow, and other manufacturers of farm chemicals (oh, and can you spot the two grammar errors in those three sentences?):

Did you hear the news? The White House is planning to have an “organic” garden on the grounds to provide fresh fruits and vegetables for the Obama’s and their guests. While a garden is a great idea, the thought of it being organic made Janet Braun, CropLife Ambassador Coordinator and I shudder.

This quote was in an e-mail to the group’s supporters, enclosing a classic-PR letter to Michelle Obama (or “Mrs. Barack Obama,” as the letter calls her–and for which one blogger took the authors to task), apparently authored by Bonnie McCarvel, Executive Director. You can see both MACA’s letter to Michelle Obama and the cover note here.

As a long-time believer in organic agriculture/sustainability and as someone who eats out of my family’s organic garden and a local organic CSA farm all summer and fall, I was all set to do a rant on the idiocy of this statement. But before jumping in, I Googled around, and decided to focus on some other lessons; that one’s been done about 24,000 times on the blogosphere already.

Lesson 1: Never say or write anything that will come back to haunt you. As MACA found out, you can’t assume an internal memo will stay internal. so say what you mean, mean what you say, and be prepared to back up your assertions.

Lesson 2: Backlash is quick and can be humiliating. Numerous petition campaigns have sprung up supporting Michelle’s desire to grow organic, and the already-shaky credibility of the pesticide industry might take a big hit.

Lesson 3: Old-school PR is no longer enough in a world where journalists no longer stand as intermediaries and gatekeepers between press releases and the public. From a technical PR standpoint, the letter MACA sent to Michelle Obama is quite good: full of reassuring language, on-the-surface well-reasoned arguments about the importance of agriculture, etc. But in a busy, harried world, it doesn’t get to the point; without the controversy, the recipient might not have even figured out (on the quick 30-second scan) that the letter was advocating chemical agriculture. Which hasn’t stopped the blogosphere from picking apart every nuance.

Lesson 4: Controversy and stupidity are just as sexy to the blogosphere as to traditional media. For all the carefully worded letter to Michelle Obama, what stands out (and is getting most of the attention) is the dumb quote in the supporter cover letter about organic gardening making them shudder.

Lesson 5: If the mainstream media wants to stay relevant, it needs to be visible. On three different Google searches on this story, including one for the exact quote from the cover letter, I did not see a single mainstream media result in the top three pages. The closest was a non-journalist’s blog quoted (apparently by a content-scraping robot) on the Wall Street Journal site, which was #28. Blogs and newsletters about gardening, sustainability, and progressive politics were all over this story, but the voice of traditional journalism was not being heard. I was actually beginning to wonder if the whole thing was an urban legend, until I finally tracked down the actual letter, on a local-foods blog. As newspapers are folding every week, as electronic news organizations are laying off staff, people will be asking why we need these trained and theoretically unbiased filters, if they’re AWOL on important stories (or if not AWOL, hidden deep under a rock). This will be a critical question. I’m of the strong opinion that we still need journalists to keep politicians and corporations honest, but journalism’s lack of presence on this and other stories makes that a much tougher argument.

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By Posted on Posted in Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Reviews, Uncategorized, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , , , , ,

Reviewed by Shel Horowitz

A very good basic introduction to the most important social network platforms–and some truly extraordinary content about how and why to use video to achieve massive conversion rates. A nice Q&A section answers several common beginner questions, very sensibly.

Clearly written, and delightfully formatted for easy on-screen reading.

Shama also walks her talk. In the six or eight months since I first saw her name, I’m running into her everywhere: on Facebook, Twitter, as a teleseminar guest with various other expert marketers…all using the no-cost social media techniques she describes in this e-book.

I’d recommend this highly for those just starting out in social media, as a way to jump-start your education. And if you’re experienced but haven’t done video marketing yet, or have not found it effective, that short section will be more than worth the price.

Shel Horowitz, author of Grassroots Marketing: Getting Noticed in a Noisy World and six other books

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics Tagged with , ,

Someone on a forum I belonged to posted a really great article. The only problem was, it looked like the poster hadn’t gotten permission.

As entrepreneurs, we need to be careful to respect the intellectual property rights of other entrepreneurs, and that includes writers, musicians, photographers, etc. It is often not difficult to get reprint permission (I have over 1000 reprinted articles on https://www.frugalmarketing.com and https://www.frugalfun.com, and I have permission for every single one. To simply place a whole article and not get permission or give credit to the source, is an act of theft, called plagiarism. But even if you give credit, if you don’t have permission, it’s still theft. And yes, that includes throwing together a scraped-content computer-powered website to try to get ad revenue from someone else’s content without asking. If you published a book, you wouldn’t want someone taking your hard work and publishing their own edition.

Remember this: when you steal from those of us who create intellectual property for our livelihood, you not only take away our ability to make a living just as surely as you would if you shoplifted goods from our stores, but you also take away the incentive for us to keep creating the things that make the world beautiful, intersting, and well-informed.

I’m sure the person who posted was not acting out of malice but of ignorance. Many people don’t think of reprinting an article as stealing, just like they don’t think throwing a toxic cigarette butt on the ground is littering. It’s totally appropriate to quote the first paragraph or two, mention some key points in the article (in your own words), and post a link–or to go get permission from the author, who’s usually pretty easy to find online.

Let’s not do things that come back to haunt us.

Note: I have posted a whole bunch of articles about business ethics on my ethics site, PrincipledProfit–and yes, I have permission for all of those as well. I’ve also written an award-winning book on success through business ethics: Principled Profit: Marketing That Puts People First.

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By Posted on Posted in media-general, Publishing Tagged with , , , , , ,

Interesting piece in the Washington Spectator, noting that the Anniston (Alabama) Star seems to be doing reasonably well, even as big-city papers around the country move to Internet-only or shut their doors entirely. Even the Boston Globe is teetering.

In my own area, I read the Daily Hampshire Gazette, published in Northampton, Massachusetts for over 200 years. Northampton is a town of about 30,000; the whole county had only 152,251 in the 2000 census.

Yet, despite a proliferation of local online advertising channels and a tough economy, the Gazette seems to be doing well also. The parent company has even acquired several newspapers recently, and the Gazette also publishes a growing number niche magazines.

Early on, the paper decided it would not cannibalize print with its web edition; many of the stories (especially the local news stuff that would be hard to get elsewhere) are behind a firewall, available only to paid subscribers. Oddly enough, I notice that the link to the Spectator story is also subscriber-only. Hmmm–can this model work? The Wall Street Journal abandoned it, but clearly traditional print journalism is not doing well in a world of free content from professional journalists.

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