BuzzGain

Friday are fun times are they not?

fail whale

I have always liked the Twitter Fail Whale. Somehow the frailities of web applications, not able to scale has made the service more human. Possibly added to the appeal of the “we are normal folks unlike Google” kind.

LinkedIn Merlin

I saw the fail whale equivalent Oops Merlin at LinkedIn today.

So which one do you like? I personally prefer the Whale. I am partial to animals though. Either one says a lot about companies turning their biggest negative press into a positive mention.

That’s the takeaway.

Lets talk about the age old question about the differences between bloggers and journalists from the main stream media. First a categorization. To us there are 3 broad categories of people you can target to generate buzz.

1. Main stream media - journalists, reporters, freelancers, editors and publishers of magazines, newspapers, radio, TV, etc. These professionals are paid to learn and write about news and happenings. Our main competitors including Vocus and Cision (and smaller ones like Burrelles Luce) provide extensive information on over 40,000 of these professionals with their media database offering. Any media database has typically information about the publication, its reach, the beat the reporter covers and the reporters contact information (email and in some cases phone).

2. Blog Networks - Since early part of this decade, online publications that started as small one person blogs such as GigaOm and TechCrunch, now have multiple writers and editors with a fairly similar agenda to the main stream media but a focus on specific content such as startups (e.g. Paid Content) or social media (e.g. Mashable). The writers for these have a revenue (and hence pageviews, readership) goal either via sponsorships and advertising so they are also “pitched” by PR professionals. Some of these professionals encourage and love having their contact information available online (providing an easy way for potential PR professionals to contact them) and others dont like being “spammed” with irrelevant pitches.

3. Independent bloggers - These are the mostly one person industry experts - Some of them love to have people email and contact them about new products and services - e.g. Louis Gray, (disclaimer: he’s helping us) and others feel its spam.

Our customers prefer to have the contact information for all of the folks in our database. We have about 80% of our targets mapped to email and phone, but we are choosing in our present version to NOT show direct contact information for the individual bloggers until we are certain they are not going to be used for sending useless PR pitches and get blacklisted.

We currently allow our customers to comment on their blogs or news sites, but do offer contact information for the main stream media.

What’s your suggestion for the best way to encourage engagement between these 3 categories of influencers and the best way for our customers to get access to them?

I was intrigued by the question Peter Kim asked on his blog a few weeks ago, paraphrasing - “Does social media marketing matter? If it does, can it scale?”. (Side note: that tells you how much I have to think to come up with a halfway good response, since it requires a lot of thinking).

Even with accidental examples of viral success and social media examples abound, I could not come up with them because “conversation marketing” involves engaging with people as opposed to talking at them, and a big part of social media is having conversations.

If you are a marketing professional there are multiple modes of getting to customers - (which is the point of marketing anyway) including advertising, sponsorships, newsletters, public relations, your corporate website, events (seminars, conferences, webinars), search optimization, direct mail etc. For a more comprehensive list check out Brian’s multimodal lead generation webinar.

The persistent lack of resources in marketing (or high leverage ratio) requires that most marketing folks spend time on highly scalable opportunities - Why? The pipeline conversion ratio (or how many suspects turn into prospects, and how many prospects turn into customers) is something they take for granted as an “industry best practice”.

The amazing part is that several of the above mentioned marketing vehicles are “high touch” or not very scalable. So does that mean you should give up regional conferences, breakfast sessions or executive briefings? I took Brian’s top list of lead generation and put them on a 2X2 matrix showing scalability and effectiveness. All comments and criticism welcome on which quadrant each of the vehicles reside. The point of that graphic is that not everything marketers do is scalable and effective.

So why do we do them?

Easy: Its what a segment of your customers want. Period.

As a good marketer you have to be where your customers are, do what your customers want and do it while managing to your budget.

There are 2 more main reasons:

1. Be cost effective: Francois interviewed Paula Drum, the VP of marketing for H&R Block and here’s the comment that struck a chord:

Based on her experience that traditional marketing program are more capital intensive, and social media marketing programs are more labor intensive - she recommends that you move some of the people resources which are going to free up because of the budget reductions to social media marketing programs.

Social media is labor intensive not capital intensive so in some ways its more capital effective. During a downturn you want more capital effective means of marketing.

2. Use the right marketing vehicle for the right stage of your customer acquisition pipeline. For someone with a hammer, they say, everything looks like a nail. If you position social media as the solution to all evils, then it wont scale, wont be cost effective and will not add value. BTW check out the video link in this paragraph, its HILARIOUS and very topical.

So what’s the right question to ask?

What are the MOST effective (cost, conversion and stage of customer acquisition) uses for social media?

Its no secret that The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is an extremely popular show with over 2.1 Million viewers (primetime), over 50,000 Internet only viewers and an extended audience of over 35,000 per episode. The favorable audience demographics (with over 60% younger than 35 years of age, over $67,000 in annual income, pre-disposed Democratic and very aware of pop culture, news and politics) has seen advertisers flock to the segment with over 67% repeat advertisers.

We analyzed the guests for 136 shows (there were fewer shows, thanks to the writers strike) in 2007 and 144 shows in 2008 (Oct 30th 2008). The show no doubt has a very current affairs and politics bent and is fairly liberal in its bias but we were more looking for 3 things:

1. What topics/themes or categories were important for The Daily Show viewers?

2. What was the “effect” on book sales from a slot at The Daily show?

3. What the net (online) PR effect of the exposure that The Daily Show brings you?

So what are the top 3 tips to be a guest on The Daily Show?

1. A overwhelming number of guests were from Politics (2008 - 47% and 2007 - 38%) or related fields (Thanks in big part to the elections). Celebrities and media personalities were second. Science and technology were relative blips. Except Bill Gates in 2007, no other technology personalities were in the lineup.

Tip #1: If you want to get on The Daily Show your best bets are writing about the effects of anything on Politics (both current and historical). So if you can talk about the effect of technology on fund raising for the elections, or the effect of Youtube on campaign ads, you’re probably a shoe-in.

2. Delayed Gratification: Only 17 times (out of 144 in 2008) did the authors make the top searches on Google Trends. That too a day after the show. We estimate this was due the fact that most of the guests were already “well known” but that would not explain the lack of searches for “the promotion” to appear on Google Trends. Meaning, what they were promoting - either a book, a movie, etc. should have appeared on the top searches, but that was not the case in a majority of the cases. The delay on Google trends also indicates the “Tivo effect” or the fact that over 35% of the people watching the daily show either tape it and watch later than its live broadcast or view it on the Internet.

Tip #2: We dont have Amazon book trends or Movie trends, to know the full effect but we can confidently say that appearance on The Daily Show should be part of your PR / book promotion strategy not the cornerstone.

3. The Net PR effect: Since 2007, The Daily Show has been posting entire episodes of the show online on their website, which has limited the ability to view the sharing trends on YouTube. But if you analyze the Digg, Discussions threads, Twitter and Social Bookmarking effect of the show, it ranks among the top on social media. The only shows that rank better are Two and a Half Men and Dancing with the Stars. For more on the details we cross-checked with our friends at Social Sights.

Tip #3: To measure the net effect of your PR with The Daily Show you have to take into account the “virality” of its spread, not just the viewers on TV or the 30-40K viewers per episode online.

What other metrics would you analyze to see the effect of The Daily Show?

The video below sponsored by the Council of Public Relations Firms has a set of very smart people talking about the future of PR than the most dangerous ideas, but its a worthwhile listen for 3-and-a-half minutes. Here’s another walk down memory lane: “Edward Bernays founded modern public relations nearly 100 years ago”.

I would highly recommend sending a link to this article to every one your PR clients. Summary:

27-year-old Sherwood Partners in Palo Alto, long known to industry insiders as “the undertaker” because its primary role is to efficiently shutter companies.

Sherwood’s gregarious cofounder Marty Pichinson on Friday afternoon, he was just wrapping up an hour-long conference call, juggling two new calls, and eager to escape the office after a very long week. Before he took off, Pichinson, who has an inimitable flair for drama, told me why startups should keep their PR people, how to negotiate with a landlord, and what most startup employees can expect in the way of a severance package.

The money paragraph:

What about public relations?

Do you listen to Warren Buffett and strike when there’s trouble? Is PR cheaper than advertising? The answer is yes. Are you better to have a third party tell reporters how great your product is? The key is to negotiate. I’m not a believer in cutting public relations if the machine is well-oiled and people are reading about you. It takes three to six months to get public relations up and running. Why throw it away?

Now, do you need an inside marketing person? Probably not at $150,000 a year. Also, outside PR probably has a wider net.

It’s a tough market land a job, and most companies are starting to layoff people. That said there are opportunities still available and many open positions. This post is about using strategies, tools & techniques to adapt and change your interview process during this downturn. I make the assumption that you have looked at several job boards and have been able to secure that critical first round of interviews or discussion.

First: what’s changed about the interview process now?

1. 1. Your competition is the decision to not hire even though for each position there are 2-3 times more the # of candidates.

2. 2. Time lines are stretched: In most companies now the CEO has the final approval on opening new requisitions or approve new hires. In normal circumstances it would take 2 weeks to get anything signed by the CEO (trust me, I’ve been there), but now it takes 4-6 weeks.

3. 3. You are meeting / interviewing with lot more people (3-4 before vs. 6-8 now). The dynamics of the interview change with the increasing number of opinions and stakeholders.

So how do you need to adapt to get hired?

1.  Network twice as much: Look for specific industries that are growing: Green Technology, Repossession firms, Property Management companies. Within industries look for companies that are doing well in a down sector: E.g. Data center consolidation (Virtualization).

Using LinkedIn you can see new hires and promotions within a company. Usually a promotion carries with it some head count or new responsibilities that might be best for a contractor or free lancer. Target those individuals first, so you can get a leg up before your interview.

2. 2. Research about the individual you are going to interview with before: Most recruiters will be able to tell you who’s going to interview you. Else hit Linkedin or Xing and get the list of all the employees in the position that you believe is relevant for you so you can better understand who’s going to interview you. With the exploding # of users on Facebook, twitter, linkedin, etc. you are bound to find more details about that person, their background, school, college. It’s a great way to break ice quickly and gives you more time to discuss what’s unique about you and how you fit the role.

3. 3. Come prepared with a point of view on the position (90 day plan): To put the person at ease that you can “hit the ground running”, spend some time to think about what are you going to do in the first 90 days. Put it in writing. A simple month by month with max of 3 bullets per month should suffice. It need not get too specific, but during your interview it gives you points to discuss.

4. 4. Provide an active leave behind which can be distributed easily via email: Your 90 day plan might be one. Some analysis on a competitor might be another. A list of relevant blogs they should be reading on the industry might be 3^rd. A landscape of the market or relevant news with your color commentary on how it affects that company might be 4^th. This makes it easy for you to be on their mind even after the interview and helps the discussion around candidates on a more tangible deliverable.

5/ 5. Be thoughtful in your follow up: The usual thank you for the email won’t suffice. That’s table stakes. Now you need to ensure that you ask questions during the interview that can lead to a more thoughtful follow up. You have more time to think about the questions, so leave an email to the individual with a more detailed response and ask 1-2 questions you missed during your interview.

The basic rules of the interview have not changed during the downturn; it’s just that changing dynamics means you need to change your strategy and correspondingly your tactics to respond better.

What do you think? How have you adapted your interview techniques during the downturn?

Yesterday we tracked SAP TechEd08 using BuzzGain and had a very interesting set of discussions on twitter that were spawned. I mentioned clearly that social media is more than Twitter and the main reason I did not discuss the other metrics was due to the length of the post. Still, there are a series of questions that our metrics did bring up that raised new questions about enterprise adoption of social media. Here are the biggest challenges that I foree in any social media monitoring solution.

1. Tracking the right people: It is about the people not keywords (stating the obvious). Most social media solutions track “keywords” which are not ideal. Why? There were about 15 other people in the SAP conference who did not talk about SAP TechED, SAP, or any other keyword you’d normally associate with the conference. The ideal solution would track key individuals (pre determined) who are the “market makers” and can be counted on to influence opinion regardless of their use of key words and phrases. We missed a few (MonkChips or James Governor for one) who is a very key analyst, he was tweeting, but not on either the hashtags or keywords. I am sure we missed several others.

2. The firewall issue: Our (unofficial) metrics track 4-7% of enterprise employees blog. In the Fortune 1000 itself, there are only ~70 companies with external blogs. The rest are behind firewalls. To give you a magnitude of that number, the F1000, employs 935,000 employees. so there are about 50,000 bloggers at the minimum and over 100,000 behind the firewall, which we will never be able to track. I think this is a low estimate BTW.

3. Tracking the wrong keywords: We already talked about this, but if you choose the wrong keywords or ones that are too broad, or too narrow, you get limited, narrow and inconsistent results. The better approach is to follow thought leaders or influencers in the space, but the current approaches (white-listed blogs or heavy traffic blogs) fall way short in identifying up and comers or selective influencers.

4. Perception (and reality) of the time-sink: I heard from 3 folks via email that their company considers their participation in social media (twitter, delicious, etc.) as a massive distraction. They get no credit or brownie points for them. So many shy away from sharing their copious notes taken on their laptop.

5. Broadband or lack of it during events: The major constitent theme I have heard from the last 10 conferences we have tracked is - the bandwidth is limited. So people tend to use their iPhone or blackberry more. Which a) is limiting and b) makes it a pain to share in a social way quickly.

I know we are working on (1) and (3). Jeremiah points out that you need a GPS rather than a dashboard for social media. I am not sure I can give a better analogy right now, but something about the GPS makes it insufficient in describing what’s needed. I cant place my finger on it, but if you can please help me out.

Cartoon credit. Geek and Poke.

What else do you think I a missing? thanks to Lee, Mike and Marilyn for ideas about this post.

Much as the technology industry is claimed to be an early adopter of all things social, Web 2.0 and community, its not making as quick progress as people think it is.

SAP TechEd08 is the annual SAP developer conference, is currently taking place in Berlin. Our good friend Mike Prosceno (who authors a good blog in his own right BTW) is there and so are many of the other SAP folks we know. I dont believe its for lack of trying. They have a TechEd Blog, a full time twitter account just for the event and forums for discussion. Over 16,000 people attend the show worldwide and a good number (over 30%) just in Berlin. So we should expect a lot of sharing, blogging, twitter, etc. Right?

1. Tweet volume (# tweets) over the last few days barely broke 300 (Just to give you a comparison, BlogWorldExpo broke 3000+ tweets daily).

2. By the hour tracking shows tweeting was more frequent in the afternoon (very counterintuitive) than in the morning. This was again very different from BlogWorldExpo.

3. The people LOVED the show though, so SAP’s gotta be happy. Positive sentiments showed up overwhelmingly which is again very different from BlogWorldExpo (where it was at 55% positive).

4. The number of unique people that did twitter was less than 0.01%. That’s very low compared to the 43-55% for BlogWorldExpo. Maybe the SAP guys are just not the chatty types.

5. Here is the best chart. Who were the influencers? The top 7: SAPTechEd, Mike Prosceno, Mike Stopforth, IdaRose Sylvester, Vuk Trifkovic, Phillip Pott, Dennis Howlett.

I do have all the data on blog posts, delicious and the rest of social media to give you a comprehensive perspective, but this post is already too long.

Summary: Few people did share and talk, and the ones that did absolutely loved it.

Questions:

1. If even a technology company with leading edge early adopters (developers) is not very socially engaged, is the market still early? Or is social media just getting acceptance? What stage do you think we are?

2. What other questions would you want to have me address from a social media perspective (what reports do you wish to see) on SAP TechEd so we can get a more comprehensive perspective?

# Update: We were primarily tracking SAPTechEd, SAPTechEd08, TechEd as the keywords. Mike and Tom Raftery emailed me saying they are seeing a lot more twitter and delicious folks, who are using no associated words to describe the event.

There are over 50 social bookmarking websites which primarily perform the function of allowing users to bookmark, share and annotate the web. We track 10 of them including Delicious, Ma.gnolia.com, StumbleUpon, Diigo, Backflip, Blogmarks, Clipmarks, Furl, Simpy and Buddymarks.

We wanted to capture the value and difference of these sites not as a user of social bookmarks, but more from the standpoint of generating viral behavior and target specific audiences. To that end we also wanted to make some recommendations on which sites provide you specific value and hence might be a better use of your time to target and nurture the users of.

The value these bookmarking sites provide includes:

1. Traffic increase: If you get StumbledUpon expect a significant traffic increase within a short period (bursty) followed by a lull.

2. Relevance and link priority: As users tag your blog post or web page, they add their own filters, which help you understand a) your brand perception and b) your relavance with that communities sphere of influence

3. Ability to understand and create your early adopter base. For our solution, it was relatively easy to find out the users who bookmarked the content, hence were very interested in the relevant solution and would be keen on learning more when the beta was available. We built our entire list of 1033 beta users to provide us feedback on our product based on who bookmarked us and who they recommended us to.

Here are the recommendations:

1. Most # of users: Delicious and StumbleUpon are way ahead of the pack. StumbleUpon users tend to be more casual users and the traffic you’ll get will be fast and swift. Delicious traffic is more like a simmering pot, but depending on your content can get you

2. Topic focus: If you are an enterprise software company, Diigo and Backflip have the most users with content relevant for that space. For Music, Furl and BackFlip do a great job, and for Lifestyle topics Blogmarks is the most extensive. Its probably a function of the initial users and their likes / dislikes, but the content relevance for those topics is the most in those sites. Health related topics makes Delicious and Clipmarks the best. Finance related topics are most frequent on Furl.

3. Speed of propogation (Virality): Although Delicious has the most users, StumbleUpon, Furl and Diigo have the fastest velocity to user traction.

What do you think? Which ones do you use and why?