Chapter 4 It’s Not Your Father’s E-mail…
(Personal note: This chapter has an interesting title, considering my father, who will be 92 in August, still doesn’t use email, and has no interest in learning it.)
As I get further into this book, I’m impressed with a couple of things: first–how much new stuff I’m learning; and second–how many times I’m finding myself with somewhat differing opinions on topics. This post will be a good example of both, and I hope the author won’t think me too forward. I’m not trying to pick a fight…just put forth some “alternate thinking” on some topics.
In this chapter, author Lon Safko is explaining how email can be used by businesses to further foster the relationship between the business and its customers. The term conversion rate was interesting to me, turning potential customers into actual customers (p. 63), and Safko says with email a business can “exceed the results generated by conventional direct mail, newspaper, magazine, and cost-prohibitive radio and television advertising.” Having come from the world of commercial television, I take issue with the huge generalization of broadcast advertising as being cost-prohibitive, but that could be the topic of a different blogspace. He then compares email to direct marketing, claiming better results from email marketing. Well, excuse the expression, but, duh! Direct mail marketing certainly has its place, but for many businesses, on a ROI basis, my experience has been that it may be much too expensive on a per customer/response rate basis.
This chapter very clearly explains that all social media is about two-way communication between a business and its customers. In the conclusion of the chapter (p. 84) Safko says “Email was the original social network.” This idea was just recently affirmed in a post from a blog by Katya Andresen– Email: the original social network . Summarizing, Andresen says “Done right, email is just as personal, conversational and bond-building as social networking.” By the way, her blog is worth reading by anyone considering using social media for business. She specifically blogs about nonprofit marketing, but much of what she talks about is appropriate for business, also.
Back to the beginning of the chapter, I’m going to question a statement the author makes on page. 64. He claims “major corporations are moving the majority of their advertising budgets to online ventures.” Really? He doesn’t give any evidence of this, other than to quote the fact that newspaper advertising is declining and online advertising is increasing. Looking at a list of the top Fortune 500 companies, is there any actual evidence that these major corporations are moving the majority of their advertising budgets to online…out of television, radio, and other legacy media?
This chapter has a great summary of email terminology and history. Take special note of the statistics on pp. 68-69, and the explanation of the CAN SPAM Act of 2004.
A point on which I absolutely agree whole heartedly with Safko is that the most important thing to remember is that content is really king…something important for ALL marketing…What’s in it for Me? He also has an interesting analogy about a business’s relationship with customers as being a “transaction.”
I also really like Safko’s explanation of the 1.54 second and 5.0 second rules.(p. 72-73) “The underlying message is that there isn’t much time to hook your customers and show them your value proposition.” This section is a MUST READ for businesses and advertising/marketing/PR agencies.
There is a lot more info in this chapter…too much to delineate here, but I do want to mention the excellent “Expert Insight” section from Neal Creighton of Ratepoint.com. Specifically, if the stuff your customers find online about you is good, they believe it…if it’s bad, they believe it.
No wonder it’s important to keep track of what people are saying about you online.
Chapter 3 of the Social Media Bible: Everyone’s a Publisher struck a chord with me, and not necessarily an harmonious chord.In the conclusion, Safko says:
The most important concept you come away from this chapter with is that during the past 35,000 years of printed communication, we are living in a time when we have the most incredible tools at our fingertips, nearly all of these tools are free to produce your content, distribution is instantaneous, around the world, and at the speed of light, your readers can access your content at no cost, and…Everyone can be a publisher!
OK, so everyone can be a publisher…but there are some responsibilities that go along with that title. I certainly understand the author’s phrase “Word of Mouth at the Speed of Light” (p. 47) but this opens a can of worms when people start to assign the term “journalist” to someone just because they know how to publish something on the Internet. More on this later…
This chapter does have an easy to read, simple history of publishing, although I think it’s somewhat of a stretch to call cave painting “photo sharing.” OK, don’t jump on me about this…I understand many texts and researchers include cave painting as an early form of communication, but “photo sharing?” Really?
The Expert Insight section adds another site to my list of “thing I need to check out” with Zimbio.com. Sounds very interesting…someday I’ll have the time…
Now, back to this issue of who gets to be called a “journalist.” First, take a minute to read a recent post from the American Society of News Editors. In this article, from the Ethics and Values Committee of ASNE, the idea is to help news organizations develop social media policies, including things like ethics, the importance of authenticating anything found on a social networking site, always identifying y0urself as journalist, etc. Everyone who thinks they can be a publisher just because they have a computer should pay attention to these best practices.
And now, to encourage some dialogue between advocates of new media vs. legacy media, please read columnist Leonard Pitts’ interesting take on the idea of “citizen journalists.” I have used this article to begin discussions in an Introduction to Mass Communication course with college freshmen. What do you think?
I guess the point is just that just because you have the tools doesn’t mean you know how to use them…just like owning a hammer and a saw doesn’t make me a carpenter.
Rant is over for today…
After a couple of weeks’ absence from this blog, I’m finally able to take some time to get back in the saddle. Actually, I’m on vacation, so I expect you to all feel sorry for me that I’m doing this work while I’m supposed to be relaxing, fishing and doing nothing else important.
An interesting addition to the chapters of The Social Media Bible, starting with Chapter 2: Say Hello to Social Networking, is that the author, Lon Safko, adds “Commandments” at the end of each chapter as a way of summarizing the most important action steps from the chapter. This is good, but I hope people don’t read the commandments first, before answering some of the other important questions that should be answered before someone jumps into social media…like WHY am I doing this? This is kind of a pet peeve of mine, which I’ll talk about more later.
In the first couple of pages of chapter 2, Safko says “Anytime there is a tool that milions of people in one place at one time, all with common interests, are clamoring to use, you as a businessperson need to understand it and be a part of it.” (p.23) I absolutely agree with “understand,” but I suggest businesses need to be careful with the “be a part of it” issue without doing the requisite research on WHY they should be part of it.
The excerpt from James Burnes’ Sales Manifesto (which you can read in its entirety here) is also just a little disconcerting to me. True, marketing/PR/advertising messages today are competing “more and more with the noise that overwhelms our target customers…” But he goes on to say:
“Can we stop being noise and become relevant again?…We need to take advantage of a new approach to selling, where we are problem solvers and the ‘go to’ team for our prospects…”
Wait a minute! Since when is this a NEW approach? Isn’t that what should have made marketing/PR/sales relevant to our clients all along…being problem solvers and a go-to team? Things like knowing lots about our client’s customers? For an interesting take on this idea, check out Are your clients Wasting Their Advertising Dollars? . The takeaway from this article is that “making media choices are much easier when we know who our audience is.”
Yes, we need to use all the tools available to us…yes, we need to keep up with technology…yes social media and social networking have changed the way people interact, both personally and professionally..but the key word in this and several other chapters is that we need to build TRUST with consumers.
This chapter has a good explanation of the social networking phenomenon, using the term “life cycle in community,” which comprises visitors, lurkers or trolls/novices/regulars/leaders/elders.
The Expert Insight section of this chapter by Gretchen Howard (p. 41) talks about what she calls “an essential first step—know your target audience.” Notice it’s NOT get on Facebook…it’s NOT design brochures…it’s NOT hire a PR agency…it’s know your target audience. Then she continues with some very good advice: “when you have a clear sense of your business, focus on how to reach customers, define your goal…then you can measure success.”
One final note…I had never heard of Google’s Open Social, so I’m looking forward to investigating it a little. And, I will also be checking out Ning, having heard about it at a recent social media seminar held at the Iowa Broadcast News Association convention.
Everybody is apparently an expert in the field of Public Relations…
I just read an article titled “5 Rookie Mistakes in Press Releases” by Mickie Kennedy in Ragan’s PR Daily News. I thought it was a really simple look at some basics about writing news releases…things I have seen PR students forget when doing this type of writing. So, I was surprised to start reading the comments after the article. Some of them offered additional good information, but some of them really slammed the author and even the online aggregator that printed the post.
I think anytime we can help PR writers do a better job, it’s worthwhile…
Just for fun today, check out this video about a new social media platform called Twirlr… or is it?
http://improveverywhere.com/2011/05/09/gotta-share-the-musical/
For the next several weeks, many of the posts in this blog will be summaries of the chapters in Lon Safko‘s book The Social Media Bible. As I mentioned in my first post, we are using this book as a textbook for a class I’m taking this summer through the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. One of our assignments is to do a blog entry explaining something about each chapter…so here we go, with Chapter 1: “What is Social Media?”
In this first chapter, the author has a recurring theme that listening to your customer is of vital importance to any business. He even says that’s how he wrote the book…by listening to comments from his readers about what they wanted in a book on this topic.
One of my favorite quotes from this chapter is on page 4: “What social media is not is a box of silver bullets given to us by aliens that will instantly solve all of our marketing woes and create instant wealth for all involved.” I’ve addressed this recently in separate Facebook and Twitter posts. It reminds me of the early days of website development when every business wanted to have a website “because that’s what everybody else is doing”…but with no real plan for how to make it an integral part of their business. The same, I think, has been true of building a social media presence for many businesses. A popular email newsletter for advertising and marketing professionals, The Monday Morning Memo by the self-proclaimed “Wizard of Ads” Roy Williams, recently addressed this same issue.
Continuing in this chapter to set up the rest of the book, Safko explains that before you can dig into the specific tactics that actually make up social media, you need to understand the premise of this being a two-way conversation with the consumer, not “pontification” (pg. 5) and that by jumping into this new kind of communication, you may lose some control over your corporate message. That being said, he then squeezes all social media into 15 fairly simple categories such as social networking, publishing, photo sharing and microblogging.
Having done a little previous research in the field, I was familiar with most of his categories, but was surprised to see the inclusion of Gaming. However, after reading his explanation (pg. 12), I can certainly understand why Gaming has a legitimate place in a discussion of social media.
As a standard procedure within the book, it looks like Safko will conclude each chapter with both a case study look at social media (ROI of Social Media) and an expert’s comments on issues within the chapter (Expert Insights).
Next up, Chapter 2: Say Hello to Social Networking, where we’ll learn more about a couple of biggies in the social media world, MySpace and LinkedIn. (Apparently the other “biggie,” Facebook, didn’t want to be involved in the production of this book, so it is mentioned tangentially, but not to the extent of other organizations that were more open to sharing their information with the author).
I’m not going say much today…just ask you to read this article from the Houston Press…“The Ten Hottest Offenders on the Texas Sex Offenders List”… and think about whether it was an appropriate way to tackle what could have been an important story. Then, as a followup, check out this post that is an apology and an explanation from the author of the original article. Be sure to take time to read the comments.
How would you weigh in on this issue?
So, when is it OK to take on a public relations client if the work you’re going to do might be considered slightly unethical? If you haven’t heard about a recent dust-up in the PR world involving Facebook and Google, check out these stories from PRNewser and Huffington Post.
The big-time PR firm Burson-Marsteller is named in this ethical breach, and they have their own take on it on their website.
This should keep the PR blogs going for awhile.
Quoting from the PRNewser story:
This is an episode that could have repercussions for the firm for quite some time because it’s both so embarrassing and involves some of the biggest brands on the planet. Moreover, it’s another big-headline story that people will reference when bringing up the ethical challenges of some in the PR industry.
For publicists, one of the many lessons of this story is that, as a PR professional, sometimes you have to discuss alternatives or decline a client’s request when the work is improper.
Just what this industry needs…another reason for people to put PR professionals in the category of “who can’t you trust?”
Just found an interesting blog by Social Media Dudes titled “3 reasons to Stick with Social Media.” While all three reasons are on-target, my favorite is “Customer Service is No Longer Just a Slogan.” Wow, could that apply to just about EVERY business out there today…from every online ordering firm to the local fast food restaurant. You should take a couple of minutes to read the post.
On another topic, Tuesday’s release of a report on digital news economics by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism certainly has plenty to say about how Journalism exists, or should exist, online and in social media. Be prepared, this is a long report…but it has much to say that those of us that are somehow involved in this business. It’s especially interesting when they talk about the importance of Journalists needing to better understand what the “business” is all about.
Again, if you’re somehow associated with the business of electronic/online journalism…or want to be…this report is a must-read.
In an article in Wednesday’s New York Times, Stuart Elliot reports that Tupperware is making a huge leap into social media, specifically Facebook and Twitter, quoting the Tupperware CEO as hoping to find “more disruptive methods to dispel perceptions that we are your mother’s Tupperware.”
It’s interesting using the term “disruptive” to describe what social media can do for their company, but the more I think about it, the more it does kind of fit how social media can really get into the lives of consumers. Elliot’s article goes on to quote Peter Nicholson, creative officer at JWT New York as saying social media “allow people to have a say in a brand,” and “the power of consumers engaging with a brand with real-time connections” can make a big difference.
I’m looking forward to watching how this works for Tupperware, and any business that is intentional about how they use FB, Twitter, and such. In our area here in northwest Iowa, Wells Enterprises, makers of Blue Bunny ice cream products, already has a considerable social media presence, thanks in large part to Kent McCuddin, senior manager of consumer communications at Wells. Check out their website and Facebook page. I’ve had Kent speak a couple of times to a class I teach in Public Relations…he really seems to have a handle on this.
Madsen Media 