The blog is the new resume – podcast
August 27th, 2008
For episode number seven of “Be the Voice” I talk with Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint and prominent blogger at Buzz Marketing for Technology.
Summary (Paul Dunay):
- The blog is the new resume
- Starting a personal/professional blog can be your social media sandbox. Play with it and learn the tricks and traps before you launch something within your organization.
- If you work at a large organization, you’re going to need to some corporate blogging guidelines. There are tons.
- You want to grow your audience so write content to elicit conversation, not act as the voice of G-d telling people what’s right and wrong.
- Pick your platform wisely. You don’t want to run into a situation where you’re on one platform (e.g. Blogger) and want to switch to another (e.g. WordPress) and you’re hesitant because the change in addressing will cause you to lose your “Google juice.”
- The best way to get a blog audience is to follow the people you want following you.
- When hosting a podcast, ask questions that will elicit honest responses to experiences rather than the talking points marketing wants to hit.
- Veotag allows you to take advantage of podcasts’ shortcomings by bookmarking chapters throughout your program.
- Know what’s on your audience’s minds and follow the news and the trends. To grab an audience always try to hook your editorial with the day’s headlines.
Full article:
Back in May I was working at The CMO Club, producing editorial coverage for the organization’s first ever conference specifically for high level marketing executives. One of the presenters I wrote about was Paul Dunay of BearingPoint who gave a fantastic presentation about putting social media into the mix for a total media/marketing campaign. I was really impressed with the total level of involvement BearingPoint was committing to social media. They weren’t just doing one blog and one social network, they were everywhere, with lots of content, contests, and conversations in many different locations. In some cases they were creating their own properties for content (e.g. New Thinking blog at BearingPoint), and in other cases they would open up discussion groups in locations where people were already congregating (e.g. on Facebook).
What Dunay orchestrated for BearingPoint didn’t come overnight. It all began when he started building his own voice through his own blog. I asked Dunay about how he began.
The blog is the new resume
Paul Dunay’s inspiration to write the Buzz Marketing for Technology blog came after reading Keith Ferrazzi’s book, Never Eat Alone. Specifically, Dunay pointed to Ferrazzi’s projection that “the blog would be the new resume” (honestly, Dunay couldn’t remember if the line was actually in the book or he just read that phrase between the lines).
From that advice, Dunay felt he should start writing a blog for his own professional growth. A good idea, but immediately he though, what am I going to do with this? “What kind of content can I create on an ongoing basis that would be an interesting conversation for most people,” Dunay asked himself as he started his blog. “I didn’t have a voice at that moment. [I] sort of started and hoped [I'd] figure it out down the line,” said Dunay, “For me it was a sandbox for me to play with a little bit before I introduced it internally.”
Following corporate blogging guidelines?
Dunay began his personal/professional blog without alerting anyone at BearingPoint. About a month into writing the blog they got wind of what he was doing and he got “the call” from corporate and they asked him, “‘Are you adhering to any sort of corporate guidelines around [the blog]?’ And of course I typed in ‘corporate blogging guidelines’ at the time to a Google search engine and came up with the IBM corporate blogging guidelines and I said, ‘Oh yes, I’m using the IBM corporate blogging guidelines.’” Not realizing he was winging his answer on the call, BearingPoint’s legal department was so happy that he was following some sort of official type guidelines that they asked him to send him a copy. And so Dunay, after seeing the IBM corporate blogging guidelines for the first time, downloaded them, and sent them off to BearingPoint’s legal department.
After that conversation, Dunay added the following copy on the front page of his blog to indicate the division between Paul Dunay the individual thought leader and Paul Dunay the consultant who works for BearingPoint.
“The postings on this site are my own and don’t necessarily represent BearingPoint’s positions, strategies or opinions.”
Developing a blogging strategy, and hooking readers
Dunay wanted to take charge of the social media strategy at BearingPoint and he knew the best way he was going to learn social media is just by doing it (How very “Nike” of him). There were two aspects of social media he needed to learn: the technical (e.g. how to set up a blog, how to configure an RSS feed, how to post a podcast) and the strategy. At the beginning, Dunay’s only “strategy” was to blog. Over time he thought about his audience, the buzz marketer, and how he should target them. Initially, Dunay was just giving advice on what they should specifically do to create “buzz.” But he quickly realized that came off as a “voice of G-d” telling you what you should do and it didn’t encourage conversation.
Dunay began to tweak his writing style to engage readers more in conversation. But to really hook people to read his posts he quickly realized that those first few words of his title were critical as they are the first words a search engine sees. Which is very true, although the way Dunay has his Blogger blog set up, the first words a search engine sees are actually AFTER the title of his blog, “Buzz Marketing for Technology.” Just prior to our interview, I had attended a WordCamp conference (a conference for WordPress users) whre SEO (search engine optimization) expert Stephen Spencer of Netconcepts recommended that bloggers put the title of their blog AFTER the blog post. This is the content that appears inside the <TITLE> tag of a blog post which gets indexed very highly on search engines. Luckily, for WordPress users, Spencer offered us a free plugin called SEO Title Tag that could do just that. Is there an equivalent plugin for Blogger?
Dunay and I then got into a discussion about the value and problems with migrating your blog to another platform. There are two ways to publish a blog. Publish it on the blog company’s servers or publish it on your own server. The advantage of the former is there’s no maintenance and it’s completely free. The disadvantage is you’re connected to their addressing system (e.g. http://davidspark.blogspot.com/interestingpost.html). While there are plenty of tools to migrate a blog from one platform to another (e.g. Blogger to WordPress) Dunay fears he’ll lose all his “Google juice,” because the addressing system will inevitably have to change. While you can bring over readers, it takes time for the search engines to rediscover your content.
“Pick your platform and your URL wisely,” advised Dunay who was having second thoughts about his blog being hosted on Blogger.
Build an audience for your blog by linking to others
Dunay said that developing an audience for his blog required linking to people, commenting on other blogs, and linking back to stuff on your blog that was relative to what they were saying. “The best way to get a blog audience is to follow the people you want following you,” recommended Dunay. It was even easier for Dunay because he would invite bloggers he liked to be interviewed for a podcast.
Dunay was posting two, maybe three times a week. Many of the people he followed were far more prolific than him. He thought of increasing his posting but realized he needed to create a balance with his work and that the schedule he created so far was sufficient.
BearingPoint has a blog as well now called New Thinking. All interactions with that blog – views, downloads, comments – are cross-referenced with other marketing that BearingPoint is doing. They’re tracking the audiences’ interest and interactions and responding. The information, updated weekly, is invaluable to them.
Dunay and I got into talking about link baiting techniques. For example, using lists or specifically going negative with posts that start “The Worst…” or the “The Biggest Mistakes…” BearingPoint does go negative for traffic, but they’re not so crass and have to be more politically judicious, so they’ll substitute the word “pitfalls” instead.
Taking advantage of podcasting’s shortcomings
Dunay admitted one of his greatest “pitfalls” came during his early days of podcasting. His first show, never actually published, was a disaster. He wrote a paper and hired a voice talent for $2,000 to read the paper into a microphone, and that was going to be his “podcast.” It didn’t sound like a show. It sounded more like a book on tape and he and his colleagues were horrified when they actually listened to it. Realizing that hiring talent to read podcasts was not going to be the solution, Dunay looked for another podcast format that was conversational and avoided the stilted premise of having a vendor come in and shill their product.
When I worked as a host of The Sprint podcast, I would often get marketing people as guests on the show. And marketing people can’t shut off that part of their brain that causes them to talk only in sales mode. They know their talking points and they can’t help themselves from repeating them. While hosting the podcast, I kept begging Sprint, please stop sending me marketing people, send me geeks to interview.
Dunay had a somewhat similar situation. While he didn’t get marketing people and got the geeks, the geeks were being trained or questioned with traditional marketing questions like, “What are the six implementation pitfalls?” Dunay shifted focus and started asking more qualitative questions such as “When you delivered this, what did the client say and what was the reaction internally?” It got around to the same point, but he realized that the medium (podcasting) was different than blogs or even video, and depending on which one you choose, “you have to design into each medium,” advised Dunay.
Dunay also confirmed something that I’ve seen time and time again about podcasting. I’m a very strong proponent and consumer of podcasts on my iPod. I subscribe to them, download them, and take them with me to listen to on my commute or when I’m working out, Problem is I’m in a severe minority. I keep seeing statistics that 70% of all podcasts are heard on the computer at the moment and not via a subscription like iTunes or on the iPod.
To facilitate that ‘listening at your computer experience, Dunay implemented Veotag’s technology on his podcasts which allows the publisher to title chapters of his podcast and let listeners skip to portions of the show. “They want the question they want answered, and that’s the end of it,” said Dunay realizing that sometimes listeners don’t want to hear his entire show. Other advantages of Veotag for podcasts is the tags improve SEO and he can run slides or video alongside the audio of the podcast.
Crafting your editorial to coincide with what’s on people’s minds now
The core of BearingPoint’s messaging is through its editorial. Building their editorial requires knowing the top concerns of their audience which revolve around issues of identity theft and personal privacy. To increase interest, BearingPoint carves its editorial to tie in their issues with topical news. For example, and admittedly not a good one but it gets the point across, BearingPoint might write a story, “What should Michael Phelps be concerned about with his presence on Facebook?” Hooking your editorial with top of mind issues increases your chances of being recognized.
A good trick to knowing what are top news stories is to follow social bookmarking sites such as Google Trends, Hitwise, Technorati, Techmeme, Digg, and Tailrank, to name a few.
Be like Dunay
For those of you just starting out, Dunay advises first and foremost that you just start. Like the lottery “You have to be in it to win it,” Dunay said. Once you start, follow what is and isn’t working. “What is getting the reaction compared to what isn’t getting the reaction,” Dunay said. If people are gravitating towards a certain subject, then build it out. Turn it into a multi-part series, invite others to comment and join in the conversation. Like any marketing you might do, success comes with time.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 5 Comments »
How to launch a community from nothing – podcast
August 25th, 2008
Episode five of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Pete Krainik, who is the CEO and founder of “The CMO Club.”
Summary (Pete Krainik):
- The CMO Club filled a pent up demand for top level marketing executives that were looking for peers to lean on for advice.
- The CMO Club’s brand has risen to be defined as “content for conversation, not content for presentation.”
- Keeping CMOs interested means finding topics of discussion that cross industries.
- Launching a grass roots organization requires touch, meaning face-to-face communications, not mass mailings.
- Creating an organization means you’re going to have to take on the branding role of “the connector.”
- Competition in a very green industry is good because it provides more editorial where there is none and raises the profile for the entire category.
Full article:
Pete Krainik is the CEO, CMO, and founder of “The CMO Club” an organization for only top level marketing professionals to engage in high level discussions and concerns that CMOs are going through (CMO stands for Chief Marketing Officer, not Chief Medical Officer which is what my father, the doctor, thought it stood for.)
Hey, want to join my exclusive club? Please?
Krainik has been very fortunate to have worked in a variety of high-level marketing and executive positions at many organizations including M&M/Mars, Seybold, Avaya, and DoubleClick. The idea for The CMO Club came out of his own frustration not being able to meet any of his peers. He’d go out to dinners at events and he’d be the only CMO. There was never an opportunity for a peer discussion. Conversations would either be very basic marketing 101 or they’d be sponsored-driven pitches.
Two years ago Krainik gathered six CMO friends for a dinner just to have that high-level discussion he was so eagerly seeking. It turns out his frustration is shared by others. Over the past two years The CMO Club dinners have spread to twelve cities with dinners every other month. Krainik had his first conference in NYC with 60 CMOs (Krainik hired me to produced editorial content at the event), and this February he launched The CMO Club exclusive site that already has 735 registered and approved CMOs.
Krainik attests the early success to just good ‘ole fashioned hard work which requires meeting and calling CMOs, personal conversations, and word of mouth recommendations. Plus, his dinners are not pay-to-play sponsored dinners. People are invited because he thinks they would provide valuable content and conversation.
Oh yes, you paid for dinner, so I guess I have to listen to your company pitch
The benefit of his events is that they cut through traditional hidden agendas, said Krainik, and CMOs can address issues that affect them like rebranding, going public, and dealing with PR issues. “Who better to help me as a CMO understand the issues I have, the challenges, or the strategies I’m about to unfold, than someone who is a peer of mine and been there,” said Krainik. Everyone comes looking for those few nuggets of advice from someone who has gone through these issues and let’s them know “don’t do this, do this” or “here are some people I recommend.”
And it’s these conversations that have become the most powerful for the attendees. Krainik’s “voice” is that of the facilitator allowing those conversations to happen. In fact, the feedback he got from his first event in May was “Great event, but we want even less speakers,” said Krainik, “They wanted more discussion.”
In fact, one of the CMOs coined a phrase that’s become the moniker for The CMO Club: “It’s content for conversation, not content for presentation.”
Krainik’s success proves there’s pent up demand for a CMO support group. The role of a CMO is tenuous they cycle through companies quickly. Eighteen months at one organization for a CMO is considered a lifetime. The high turnover is not because they’re getting fired, but rather because they’re fed up and want to move on.
Benefits of The CMO Club from Jen Sanning, CMO Rainbow Rewards
CMOs can get bored quickly, so keep them interested
At this point in the conversation, Krainik and I shifted roles and I began to question him more about the issues he’s having growing The CMO Club and the brand. His number one challenge is to come up with topics and vehicles to get CMOs to want to participate and share their insight beyond the dinners. He truly wants to differentiate his organization from similar high-level executive organizations.
Topics that cross multiple industries do very well, said Krainik. For example, How do I keep great marketing stars? How do I influence change at the C-level? How do I approach social media and how do I think of it as being connected to all my other components? How do I manage globally?
At the end of each dinner Krainik sends a recap out to all the attendees. It’s an excellent way to build relations and provide extended value from an event. But he has to keep this recording of information to a minimum because one of the values of his dinners is the privacy of information.
One way he’s maintaining balance is by conducting short video interviews with a Flip camera asking CMOs at the dinner what was their number one takeaway. It has two-fold value: it respects the CMO’s time (it only takes a minute) and other CMOs love to hear what’s on other CMO’s minds. The response to these videos has been very positive.
All projects must be measured from Phil Clement, CMO, AON
Everyone loves the life of the party
This type of connecting that Pete Krainik is doing reminds me of what Ken Rutkowski and Jeff Pulver who have become known connectors in the tech industry, hosting dinners and introducing people. Both are very creative with intriguing ice breaker conversation starters at their events. Rutkowski requires attendees to bring a piece of juicy gossip nobody knows to share with others, or at the last event you had to mention someone else you just met and plug their company. Jeff Pulver turns people into human tagging and taggable objects. You write tags on stickers to describe what you think a person is like and you stick it on them.
You’ve established a brand and editorial, how do you monetize it?
Krainik is constantly thinking of ways to monetize and also bring interest, traffic, and community to his site. One way he would like to do that is through a recommendations section where CMOs can recommend talented vendors, people, products, and services. Based on some advice I received from a former colleague, I suggested Krainik put recommendations in his regular mass emails to attendees. Let them see that a specific CMO recommends this vendor, and put in the quote as to why he/she thinks that vendor is so great. That way, over time, CMOs will start to associate The CMO Club with this recommendation service.
Where is your audience?
Krainik has a very unusual issue in that there really isn’t a single area online or in the offline world that all CMOs go to. That makes it very difficult to message or reach them all. He’s trying to build a community where a community hasn’t existed before. In such situations, competition is actually very helpful because conversation and communication on the topic raises the profile of the entire industry and everyone benefits. One such competitor to The CMO Club is the CMO Summit from the CMO Council and I suggested Krainik open a dialogue with him.
When I used to work as a stand up comic, we would see this happen in the comedy industry. A new comedy club would open in town and do a lot of marketing or would get a huge headliner. The initial reaction was to think, “Oh no, this is going to destroy the smaller club.” But quite the opposite would actually happen. Smaller clubs in town would see a jump in attendance at their clubs as well because the public’s interest in the category of comedy had been piqued.
The reason people come back, said Krainik is that people are looking for those one or two valuable nuggets of information. If they get just a couple of those great nuggets or connections, then it’s all worth it.
Starting a community from scratch
For other organizations looking to create a community, Krainik said you have to start with the touch. Face to face in the beginning is critical, said Krainik. Start from that rather than thinking, ‘How can I create the site to get millions of eyeballs?’ Instead said Krainik, “Start with the touch, and then move back.”
“Marketing Health vs. Healthcare” from Leo Tokar, CMO Kaiser Permanente
Filed under: Editorial, Podcast, Video | 1 Comment »
Feed the market what it wants and you don’t need to do marketing – podcast
August 23rd, 2008
Episode five of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Dana Gardner who is the founder and principal of the analyst firm Interarbor Solutions.
Summary (Dana Gardner):
- Deliver high quality content and the social media tools and search engines will do their work to make your material discoverable.
- Answer your audience’s questions.
- It is possible to produce editorial content that satisfies the desires of your audience and your sponsors.
- BriefingsDirect aims to expose in full the analyst briefing experience. A valuable conversation that traditionally has been hidden from the public.
- Social media allows for interaction and feedback from your audience which is far cheaper and faster than conducting traditional research.
- Flame wars can result in great traffic, but they don’t solicit the audience you really want.
- Don’t rely on a single individual to be the voice of your company. Create a network of voices.
Full article:
Dana Gardner is the founder and principal of the analyst firm Interarbor Solutions, he blogs for ZDNet, and he’s also the host of BriefingsDirect, a podcast that lets sit in and listen to the in depth conversation during an analyst briefing. Gardner has been a journalist and industry analyst for years, covering IT in the enterprise and currently focuses on hot issues for enterprise organizations such as service-oriented architecture or SOA. The combination of being an analyst, producing freely available content, and distributing it to the people who need it make up the three pillars of his business.
Gardner began producing all this content when he saw a need in the market for someone to be an advocate at the enterprise level for IT decisions and spending. The enterprise has traditionally been the space for innovation, said Gardner. Discoveries happen at the highest levels and then they work their way down to the masses thanks to economies of scale. Gardner though readily realizes that the complete reverse happens all the time. It’s what’s getting all the press these days. Technologies start at the bottom, at a pedestrian or grass roots level, and then they bubble up to the enterprise. Think Web 2.0 and it’s enterprise moniker, Enterprise 2.0.
Steve Gillmor, Dana Gardner, and Dan Farber (photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid)
Detailed answers to audience questions
Gardner is always looking to answer questions people have in his area of expertise. He recognizes that he’s riding the hype curve, but that’s what people are interested in that given time. And if Gardner wants to stay relevant he has to provide answers to what concerns his audience at the time they need the information.
Given the complexity of IT development in the enterprise, any discussion on the topic has to be thorough in order to be credible to the audience. In Gardner’s own work, what he discovered was the more detailed, deep, and rich his content was, the more the search engines paid attention, driving traffic to his Web site. Pointing to one example, he wrote a post on “application modernization.” It only got a couple of comments, yet today a search on “application modernization” into Google, brings that post up as the second post.
Feed the market what it wants and you don’t need to do marketing
“When you become associated as a content producer with essential keywords in IT you don’t have to go out and do advertising or marketing. The fact that you’re defining some of the top organic content around very important up and coming and global IT subject matter makes people recognize it,” Gardner said, “I don’t know enough about the algorithms of the search engines to feed them what they want, but I try to feed the market what it wants in terms of education, evangelism, and understanding, and hope that the algorithms recognize that and then that becomes a self fulfilling or virtual adoption pattern.”
Gardner has found that by finding his niche of delivering high quality B2B content, the social media tools and search engines will do their work to make his material discoverable.
Producing editorial that satisfies your audience and sponsors
Companies will sponsor Gardner’s content, but as Gardner explained, “I take into full account what they’re (the sponsor) trying to accomplish, but my number one role is to be an advocate for the listener and to be important and valuable and productive for the people that find the content. And my secondary role is trying to be productive and an advocate for the sponsor. The nice thing is that you can do both. It is not an either or or zero sum equation. However, you don’t want to err too far in one way or the other. If you’re just out there for just a consumer level discussion then somebody wouldn’t be interested in sponsoring it. It has to be deep it has to be specific. It has to be about a technology that’s emerging. On the other hand if you’re too far in the advocacy side of the sponsor well then you become of diminishing value to the end listener. And so striking that balance is what becomes essential and that’s why the analyst briefing model works so well is because organizations that come in to brief an analyst know they’re not going to BS them. They’re not going to pull a snow job over on these people. These people are too well versed and well educated in the subject matter to do that. At the same time the analyst does legitimately want to learn a lot more about this organization because they need to present this back to the market.”
Take cutting room floor content and produce it as social media
Gardner said he got the idea for his podcast BriefingsDirect from his work at a previous analyst firm. “We’d have hour long discussions with people – fabulous discussions – deep penetration into the markets, the trends, the competitive analysis, the implications, the ongoing business outcomes, but 5% of what took place in these discussions would end up in an analyst report. I figure I’d take the 95% left on the cutting room floor and present it out as social media,” said Gardner.
Allowing for conversation across social media has proven to be a fabulous research tool. “The feedback you take back from that (allowing comments on your blog) is very valuable. I highly encourage anybody to blog for no other reason than to enjoy a rich market research capability,” said Gardner, “You can learn so much from a few quick comments that might take you months and then some significant investment to uncover otherwise.”
Social media is alluring, but don’t fall into its traps
Gardner has seen other companies fall into the trap of not committing to social media even though they “say” they want to do it. “Unfortunately, many times, like with blogging, companies will do this (social media) three or four times and then suddenly it falls to the back burner. Other people are very busy. They don’t have the time. They see it as an imposition. Publishing and/or presenting in a media format is not their core competency. They feel a little unsure of themselves. And because they don’t do it frequently, it becomes stale,” Gardner said.
In his past, Gardner admits he would get into online arguments that would get him excited to keep doing it because the traffic on his site would shoot up as a result of all the arguing. But over time Gardner realized that flaming and reflaming and getting into these arguments don’t amount to much and it ultimately doesn’t attract the right kind of audience. “Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content then appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.
Your company’s voice should be a network of voices, not just an individual voice
You have to make a decision if this is worthwhile for you as an organization to do. Is there a lot of information your company possesses that your audience wants to know? If so, then you need to be out there communicating. But remember not every business is capable of producing content on an ongoing basis without it becoming arduous and consuming. That’s when you have to decide is it better to do it yourself, partner, or buy.
Once you go into production, be wary of giving one individual too much public authority. “If you’re a company and you’ve got an individual who becomes the voice of your company, they might leave in two months and you have to start from scratch,” warned Gardner. “If you’re a company though, be careful that you don’t place this visibility and brand in the hands of someone who is only a resume away from moving on to some other place,” said Gardner. If someone leaves, you will lose the audience you had two days earlier.
Gardner advises to create a network, not an individual. Have a stable of people, third parties, and outside influencers. You want to create a community and conversation, but don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 3 Comments »
Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face – podcast
August 18th, 2008
Episode four of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars Charlene Li, independent (formerly with Forrester) thought leader covering emerging technology.
Summary (Charlene Li):
- Charlene Li leaves Forrester to break out an independent though leader and consultant in the area of emerging technologies.
- Business communications have changed. Even if you try to hide problems, they will eventually be discovered and blow up in your face.
- Social media should not be treated like an advertising campaign. It’s a conversation. And conversations are open ended.
- If you don’t give your audience what they need and want, it doesn’t matter how great a voice you have, they won’t come and listen to you.
Subscribe to the podcast via iTunes
Subscribe to the Be the Voice blog
Full article:
I’ve run into Charlene Li many times at related tech industry events in the San Francisco Bay Area. Last time I saw her was at the Blogher conference in San Francisco which also happened to be her last day at Forrester where she worked for 9 1/2 years as an emerging technology analyst. I asked Charlene what she was going to do now and she said she was going to break out on her own as an independent thought leader.
The decision said Li was due to a collection of different events converging. While she was very happy with her time at Forrester, she wanted more balance between her work and home life (she has two children). And the success of her new book Groundswell has proven to her that she’s developed a strong enough industry voice for herself that she has the capability to be successful on her own.
As an independent, Li wants to broaden her reach to cover and track more emerging technologies, such as mobile, and not be pigeon-holed into just social media because she’s interested in all technologies and how they relate to social media.
Her audiences include other thought leaders she wants to influence, practitioners that want advice on what’s good and what’s bad, and then there’s the press for which she advises as well. At Forrester, she developed a very strong relationship with the press who are constantly looking for tips on breaking news and feedback on phenomenons. In fact, I think she’s NPR’s go to person for anything and everything that’s social media.
Charlene Li wants her independent consulting and online voice to be more conversational and not so institutionalized as when she worked at Forrester, which offers a far more considered “from the company” opinion. Her own personality and personal experiences are injected in her analysis of emerging technologies. But being an independent will not be the first time she will have done that. She developed her own voice at Forrester, where the company allowed her to do just that even though they knew that she could leave at any time. She did eventually leave, but only after working there for more than nine years to which Li said speaks volumes of how much she enjoyed working at Forrester.
I was surprised to hear that Charlene Li spends only two to three hours a week at most on blogging activities. It’s an area she doesn’t rely on for her industry voice. What she does rely on are her public appearances and her strong relationship with press for which she spends at least an hour every day talking with journalists.
What she likes so much about public speaking is NOT delivering typical “voice of G-d” speeches which come off as “you’re stupid if you don’t get this.” Rather she prefers more conversational presentations that try to make technology less scary and show how others can use it in your every day life. She tries to avoid a lot of the hype. She just wants to boil it down to what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.
Any problems you’re hiding will eventually blow up in your face
Typical client engagements for Charlene Li involve companies about to launch a product and maybe they don’t know how open they should or should not be about it. I asked in what situations does she advise one way or the other and Li said it all depends on the client’s audience. Does the audience want openness?
Many companies are very fearful of that openness because they think something’s going to blow up in their face. Business communications have changed, said Li, and any problems you may be hiding now will blow up eventually. The question is do you want it to blow up two days from now or two months from now? A core part of Li’s job is advising clients on the relationship they need to build with their customers.
Advertising agencies are misguiding their clients developing social media campaigns
“I think advertising agencies are doing a great disservice to the industry because they’re creating what I call ’social media campaigns,’ rather than a strategy that says, ‘This is what the relationship is going to look like.’ [Social media] is not a one off. It’s a long term conversation you want to have with these people. It sounds kind of trite, but conversations are open ended and marketing and advertising by definition are not open ended. They want you to go buy a product. That’s not what people want these days,” Li said.
For those companies fearful of this kind of openness, Li advises them to start something small off in the corner of the organization and see how it works and what it needs to survive. For example, the corporate blogging mark of success is Bob Lutz’s Fastlane blog. It appears it was the first blog for GM because that’s the one that got all the press. But it was not GM’s first blog, said Li, GM’s first blog was actually a small block engine blog celebrating the 25th anniversary of the block engine. The success of that small blog gave GM and Bob Lutz the confidence to launch his more high profile blog publicly at the auto show.
You must listen to your audience in order to build your business
Now that Charlene Li is going independent and is no longer a Forrester salaried employee, I asked her how she’s going to manage and rationalize all her non-revenue generating work like blogging and research. “My posts are based on revenue generating. Because these are the questions that people will be dying to ask me about. They want to dig deeper into it. They want to have discussions with me about it,” said Li, “These are topics that are very much driven by what my clients and my prospects are thinking about. So that’s always at the front of what I’m doing. Frankly, if you don’t give your audience what they need and want, it doesn’t matter how great a voice you have, they won’t come and listen to you.”
“The core content has to address the core problems that other people are willing to pay money to get more information about,” Li advised. As a result, Li goes out of her way at events or with clients and vendors to talk to users and ask them what are the problems they’re facing to better understand the issues of her audience.
Unlike Alec Saunders who committed himself to posting three blogs a day, Charlene Li only publishes when she has something to say and something that her audience wants to hear. She doesn’t want to waste her audience’s time with frivolous content. For others, she recommends they have a clear strategy in mind. What is it you want to say and not want to say over what platforms, e.g. blogs, Twitter, social networks, etc. And what is it your audience wants to hear? That will be your content strategy.
For more on Charlene Li, visit her blog.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast, Web 2.0 | 4 Comments »
Build your audience by sharing their ideals and beliefs – podcast
August 17th, 2008
Episode three of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars two of the founders of The Conversation Group, Chris Heuer (Social Media Club) and Peter Hirshberg (Technorati).
Summary (Chris Heuer and Peter Hirshberg):
- A company with all its employees blogging and talking with customers is more powerful than its sales force.
- It’s important to give employees great work experiences, because they live in social networks and they will communicate that to others.
- “Tofu” are PR-crafted messages to bloggers that are targeted correctly, but have no basis for a relationship.
- Blogger relations is like a cocktail party: listen first and find a commonality to begin a relationship.
- You have to share the ideals and beliefs and what your audience cares about.
Full article:
Driving up from a dinner and panel at the Building Blocks conference in San Jose, Chris Heuer of Social Media Club and The Conversation Group and Peter Hirshberg also of The Conversation Group and chairman of Technorati talked with me about engaging with your community. Both offer some amazing insight with regard to developing your voice, caring about what your audience cares about, and NOT just being an agent to deliver a message for a brand or company.
Traditionally, clients are major brands and through traditional advertising, marketing, and PR, they would create one-way positioning. The problem is brands in of themselves don’t create a voice. Rather individuals within an organization become the voice associated with the brand. Examples are Robert Scoble and Microsoft or Bob Lutz and GM. It puts a face on what is often a faceless or unapproachable organization. “Customers love to hear from the experts within brands,” said Hirshberg.
“The reason Sun loves it when all of its employees are bloggers is their view is ‘well if we have all of these touch points between our employees and our customers that is a hell of a lot more than our sales force or what we can do in broadcasting,’” said Hirshberg. Heuer admits that when The Conversation Group deals with clients that aren’t as advanced as Sun, they are hesitant. They’re concerned to support an environment where they have 50,000 employees speaking to their customers and they aren’t speaking on message.
Watch what you say around the office. Your coworkers are talking about your when they leave the office
But the environment has become Enterprise 2.0: social media tools being used for communications inside and outside of the enterprise to improve communications and relations. As Hirshberg explained, employees can no longer be viewed as cogs in a machine. Your staffers live and breathe in social networks. And even though people talk about wanting to keep their work life and personal life separate, they really don’t and as a result it’s hard to keep those two worlds apart.
“One of the big things companies are beginning to understand is since your employees are always talking, you need to do great things to keep your employees excited and thrilled, so that’s what they project to the world,” Hirshberg advised, “Because if your employees turn on you, you can’t shut it up, the word will get out.”
It’s not new explained Heuer, “Individuals have always represented their companies. With social media it just becomes more visible.”
Your PR team has no relationship with bloggers, so why are they talking to them?
“If you want people to contribute and get involved, you need to ask them things,” said Hirshberg.
One thing that The Conversation Group does is blogger outreach, communicating with people who are creating content online that would have interest in the conversation or content The Conversation Group is producing on behalf of its clients. Heuer reasserts that the most important part of blogger outreach is the relationship, not just the relaying of information.
Heuer brings up two concepts, “tofu” and “bacon,” that have been bandied about in the blogger outreach community. “Tofu” is the process of studying the person’s blog and crafting a tailored message so that the communications is sound. It’s a common practice among PR agencies who send emails on behalf of their clients. The problem with “tofu”-style communications is there isn’t a basis for a relationship. “[Tofu] is crafted, it’s personalized, it’s made nutritious, but people don’t like the taste of it anyways,” Heuer explained. Conversely, “bacon” are the messages commonly seen on social networks that are a little big fatty and a little bit tasty. You’re drawn to them because they’re attractive to you personally, but only initially. So messages like “somebody just added you as a friend” or “somebody just posted a picture of you” are considered “bacon.”
“The first thing is the person who is doing the outreach better have his own reputation as someone who cares about the community and is an individual. Because if you’re just reaching out as an agent on behalf of an agency on behalf of another corporation and you don’t have a presence for people to turn to and say, ‘Oh, wow I really like this person,’ you’re really not going to be as effective,” advised Heuer, “Blogger outreach in general doesn’t work as effectively as people think it does. You really have to have those relationships within that community and an understanding of what those people care about.” Bloggers hate press releases and they hate being talked at.
Politics, the latest with Paris and Britney, and more conversation starters with bloggers
Hirshberg explains blogger relations is like going to a cocktail party. You don’t just barge in and announce who you are and what you’re doing. Rather you listen, and find a point of commonality and a reason to relate.
Bloggers write about what they care about, and they often do it for free. They’re not beholden to some other editorial mandate that dictates what they can and can’t write about. That’s why they respond positively to people who show interest in their work and develop a relationship with them.
“As soon as it’s me talking to you, trying to get you to do something as opposed to me just talking to you, it changes the dynamics of the relationship,” warned Heuer of the traditional PR process of “flacking” bloggers and press. You need to extend invitations to participate, and return the favor by letting bloggers know what you’re going to do for them and their readers in return.
“The question is how do you build something that folks care about and will naturally spread as opposed to something that people feel like they need to be badgered into doing,” asked Hirshberg, “At the end of the day, all this outreach stuff is like kindling. You work very few people and you hope it will multiply.”
Chris Heuer brought up the issue of the “end of messaging” which is an issue that Chris Peterson of Chautauqua Communications (now part of the R2C group) agrees with. But Peterson believes it’s all about story. Heuer says it’s all about how do we get the “gist” across. It’s beyond the message, and it’s the goal of the story. That’s because depending on who you speak to, the message needs to be tailored differently because each person or category of people have different needs.
What’s “The Big Ideal?”
Hirshberg brought up Ogilvy’s theory of marketing that we’re trending away from “The Big Idea” to “The Big Ideal.” “‘The Big Ideal’ has to do with the fact that to break through clutter today you actually have to share the ideals and beliefs and what your audience cares about, because people really pay attention to what they care about,” said Hirshberg, “If your communications is based on siding with, amplifying, supporting, throwing attention on the ideals of what your audience cares about, they’re more likely to pay attention to you and spread the message.” Most common in this space today are companies that rally around “green” issues.
It’s beneficial to your bottom line and it can reduce costs. “The more excited they are the less your advertising budget needs to be because they’re going to do the advertising via word of mouth for you,” explained Heuer. This is what happened when Nike+ created an environment for others to communicate. It was so successful reaching their audience that they were able to cut their TV ad budget by tens of millions in one year.
Filed under: Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast | 2 Comments »
Even the best description of your product can’t beat a demonstration of your product – podcast
August 4th, 2008
Episode one of the “Be the Voice” podcast stars VoIP industry thought leader and founder of iotum, Alec Saunders.
Summary (Alec Saunders):
- The “Holy Grail” of “Be the Voice” communications is to build thought leadership using your own product.
- Give people the opportunity to see in action an applicable and fun use of your product.
- The best description of a product can’t beat a demonstration of your product.
- On developing his thought leadership in Voice 2.0, Saunders said, “I’m pushing others in the industry to adopt these technologies because when they do, it becomes easier for our company to do business.”
- The alternative to spending money on marketing is developing your industry voice. It’s cheaper and long lasting.
- Saunders’ blog traffic jumps correlates with jumps in his business site’s traffic (iotum).
- Frequency of content wins. Saunders went from 300 visitors a day to 200,000 a month in just one year solely by writing three posts a day, NOT engaging in social media.
The full article:
Alec Saunders is the author of the VoIP-centric blog, SaundersLog, and also the roundtable tech podcast, The SquawkBox. These are the avenues that he uses to expose his wisdom and engage others in conversation about VoIP and also technology in general. For the past year I’ve admired the dedication he’s put into developing his industry voice through his blog and podcast. It’s why I asked Alec to join me in a conversation about how he’s used blogging and podcasting to become a leading voice in telephony and VoIP.
In addition to blogging and podcasting, Saunders is the CEO of Iotum, a voice call management technology that operates on BlackBerry devices and on the Web. Out of Iotum, he also launched a free conference call tool, Calliflower, which he uses to record his SquawkBox podcast.
Building thought leadership using your own product
What really drew me to interview Alec is he’s accomplished what I think is the Holy Grail of “Be the Voice” communications. He is building thought leadership using his own product. People who are interested in being a participant in Saunders’ daily SquawkBox recording simply join the Calliflower conference call which is recorded and then posted on his blog. The daily podcast varies between a roundtable discussion of the tech news of the day, or Saunders invites a guest to talk about their new product offering. Personally, I’m so impressed with the process that I’ve volunteered to be a substitute host.
It’s not always possible for someone to use their own product to build their own public voice. But when you can, you’re giving people the opportunity to see your product in action. And when people see it, can participate in it, they see the value of it, and then there’s no need to actually invest in marketing or have a formal sales pitch. As much as you describe a product, no description can even come close to seeing a product in action. The value Alec Saunders brings to his company Iotum and its product Calliflower is by recording a five-days-a-week podcast.
Calliflower’s first iteration was a Facebook application simply called, “Free Conference Calls.” Iotum took advantage of Facebook’s pre-built listings because as Saunders said, “The emergence of social networks is going to drive all kinds of changes in directories.” Saunders still believes that’s going to happen, but it’s not happening at the pace he thought it would happen. That’s why when Iotum rereleased the product as Calliflower, he kept the Facebook application in tact, but he also took the product outside of the closed social network and allowed anyone to join.
Becoming the voice of “Voice 2.0″
Three years ago Saunders wrote the “Voice 2.0 Manifesto” arguing that there’s going to be an intersection between the openness of the Internet and the closed limited functionality of the telco industry. It’s a world that communications providers have been forced to participate in for years, but given the Internet’s ability to build lightweight communications applications on top of Internet protocols, like HTTP, Voice 2.0 communications removes the traditional constraints of business.
Within twelve months of writing his manifesto, “Voice 2.0″ became a meme that spread throughout the world and there was a conference launched by the same name. Saunders didn’t try to own the name as he knew its value had greater value to the community. “I’m pushing others in the industry to adopt these technologies because when they do, it becomes easier for our company to do business,” realized Saunders. As of writing this post, if you do a search for “Voice 2.0″ on Google, Alec Saunders’ blog appears in the top two results.
Saunders explains his rationale for building so much online voice. As a start up, Iotum simply doesn’t have the marketing budget of his competitors. The most effective promotion they do is the blog and podcast, Saunders said.
Why blogging critical to your business
It’s difficult to show a one-to-one correlation between blogging and sales, but Saunders can still demonstrate the value of blogging using a tool called Alexaholic (now called Statsaholic as required by Amazon). The tool allows you to compare the Alexa traffic for various Web sites. Saunders showed one friend the traffic of Saunderslog vs Iotum demonstrating that when his blog traffic spiked, so did his company site.
Saunders repeated the process using his friend’s business site. He could see a handful of tiny bumps where the company issued press releases. But that was it. There was no continuing interest in the company like what Saunders had developed over the long term with his blog. The difference between Saunders and his friend, is his friend was spending all kinds of money on promotional marketing and nothing was happening. Saunders didn’t spend any money on marketing. He just blogged. Said Saunders, “I’m just out there talking to people. The difference is [with blogging it's] palpable and apparent.”
Saunders gets calls from people who have heard or participated in the SquawkBox podcast and they want to become users of Calliflower for free conference calls. Saunders provides the answers they’re looking for and they return as users.
The biggest tip Saunders offers to anyone else wanting to jump into blogging or podcasting is frequency. Lack of it during his early days of blogging was his biggest mistake. Saunders began blogging only when he felt he had something to say, which could be weeks. “There was a period of time several months went by and my traffic went down, and down, and down, and down, and people weren’t coming by. And they never had a reason to return because I wasn’t publishing anything new,” said Saunders.
A mutual friend of ours, Andy Abramson, also a VoIP blogger and owner of the public relations and marketing firm Comunicano, advised Saunders to blog three times every day. Saunders was shocked at the advice, but he did it, even on weekends, for an entire year. The result is his traffic went from 300 people a day, to 1000 pretty quickly. By the time the year was over he had 200,000 visitors a month. Blogging was all he did. He didn’t take advantage of any of the social media tools. “A lot of people invest in everything in social media. I decided to focus on one thing really really closely, and that was content,” said Saunders, “You don’t get the comments traffic until you get the content for people to comment on. You don’t get people returning over and over again or commenting on what you wrote on other blogs until you’ve got the content.”
Saunders’ blog created enormous interest from carriers who were very interested in what we were trying to do. It was that interest that led Iotum to building its BlackBerry call management product and Saunders writing the “Voice 2.0 Manifesto.”
“Blogs are great marketing tools,” said Saunders. Blogs create lots of content and lots of links and that’s exactly what Google look for. Static Web sites won’t ever be able to do that.
“If you’ve got the ability and the desire to write you can create a very valuable promotional tool for your company,” advised Saunders.
Blog.
Filed under: Blogging, Collaboration, Editorial, Podcast | 9 Comments »
The Social Media Fallacy
July 27th, 2008
Below is a short presentation I gave last week to the SVAMA (Silicon Valley American Marketing Association) about how social media has been sold to us through the general media and social media consultancies. The big story that’s constantly sidestepped is that you must first create great editorial content and THEN you can worry about distribution (social media).
I put together this short (6 min) Slideshare presentation to debunk the traditional way social media is being sold and offer a more sane and logical approach to developing industry voice to grow your business.
This is cross-posted on my blog, Spark Minute, but I thought it would be appropriate to launch the “Be the Voice” blog and podcast with this presentation.
I’m interested to know your opinion. Do you agree/disagree this is how it’s being sold and do you believe/not believe that the social media evangelists are sidestepping the issue of content?
Filed under: Editorial, Video, Web 2.0 | 2 Comments »
Welcome to the Be the Voice blog and podcast
July 9th, 2008
Welcome to the “Be the Voice” blog and podcast. This blog is an ongoing project to uncover the stories of how businesses are driving business growth through thought leadership.
In the new economy of ideas and information, your business growth is dependent on your ability to educate your audience at the time they need to make decisions. Creating an industry voice is critical, because every time you provide an answer at a key point, you move potential consumers along the decision making process to purchase. The goal is to turn these seekers into consumers and ultimately evangelists who in turn will help your business continue to provide decision making information.
Are you creating editorial content online that’s driving your business’ growth? If so, I’m interested in talking with you. Please contact me at david AT sparkmediasolutions DOT com.
Please visit Spark Media Solutions if your company is looking for an industry voice producing solution.
And for more on me, David Spark, please read my blog, Spark Minute or my bio.
Filed under: Blogging, Editorial, Podcast | No Comments »