Web Ink Now

Welcome MarketingSherpa Viral Marketing Hall of Fame readers

If you are visiting Web Ink Now after reading the MarketingSherpa Viral Marketing Hall of Fame announcement, welcome! Thanks for stopping by.

I am thrilled that one of my campaigns has been named to the Viral Hall of Fame for the second year in a row!

Here is some information to get you oriented to my blog and my site. I am an online thought leadership strategist and through my books, seminars and speaking I show organizations how to harness the amazing power of viral marketing.

Web Ink Now is my blog where I show readers how online thought leadership content (including news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media) is the best way to reach buyers directly. These are the new rules of marketing and PR.

The old rules were much more simple—you developed one-way "messages" and either bought expensive advertising or you tried to convinced the media to write about you. These old tactics are much more costly, time consuming, and difficult than using the Web in smart ways to get noticed.

The new rules are that you reach your buyers directly with online thought leadership content that they actually want to consume.

Here are some things you might want to check out while you are here:
> My free ebook The New Rules of PR (named to the MarketingSherpa Viral Marketing Hall of Fame in 2006).
> My thoughts on Branding (it is for cattle).
> My audio seminars
> Information about having me speak at your next event
> My ideas on PR people and reaching the media (something is wrong in PR land)
> My new book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly

Please consider subscribing to this blog's RSS feed or Feedblitz email updates.

In my latest book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly which comes out in May 2007 in hardcover from Wiley, I provide much more on viral marketing. In the book I provide dozens of case studies of people using online content to reach buyers on the Web including large companies and small, B2B and consumer, as well as nonprofits, rock bands, political campaigns and more. Learn more about the book here.

Thanks again for stopping by!

Do You Squidoo?

The popularity of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga is phenomenal. Social networking sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves and use it to create a virtual network of their offline friends and to make new friends online.

Another social networking site called Squidoo is based not on personal profiles of individuals but on people's expertise in a niche subject. Squidoo is another way for marketers to build an online presence easily and for free. Squidoo, headed up by "original squid" Seth Godin—the founder of Yoyodyne (which he sold to Yahoo! in 1998), creator of "Permission Marketing," and best-selling business author of Purple Cow and Small is the New Big—is built around online lenses, which are a way to filter a person’s expertise on a subject onto a single page.

With Squidoo, interested people check out a lens on a topic and quickly get pointed to useful Web sites. A person who makes a lens is a lensmaster, and he or she uses a lens to provide context. "Everyone is an expert," the Squidoo site says, and Squidoo helps everyone share that expertise with the world.

A lens is not a destination, but rather like a guide that sends visitors to other places. The Squidoo FAQ says, "It's a place to start, not finish." Lenses provide detail on a topic and point to other content such as blogs, favorite links, RSS feeds, Flickr photos, Google maps, or Amazon books. I've created (at this writing) five lenses and for a lensmaster like me, the effort is minimal (each lens, such as the one I created on Web Content only took an hour or two to create), yet my lenses are consistently one of the top ten referring sites to my blog and Web site—only the search engines such as Google and the magazine and marketing sites I write for generate more traffic for me.

Auto Repair on Squidoo

Vince Ciulla, a professional automotive technician with over 30 years' experience, has created a popular Squidoo lens called Auto Repair – Trouble Shooting that points to content on his main site. A part of the All Info About network, this main site offers over 20,000 pages of auto repair content, including some 9,000 questions and answers. "A lot of people want to do their own repairs, and finding information about specific vehicles on the Web is difficult," Ciulla says. "Fixing your car is easy, the hard part is figuring out what's wrong. My Web site and links from my Squidoo lens is how people can get the information they need for free, such as how to replace a brake master cylinder. I also explain things like how the cruise control works."

Most of the traffic to Ciulla's site comes through search engines, but visitors also come from Squidoo. "The last time I checked, there were 210,000 search terms pointing to my pages," he says. Ciulla makes money from advertising on his site and also from telephone consultations with people who want to discuss specific auto repair issues with him. He's conducted some 2,500 paid telephone consultations as a result of people finding him online and wanting to tap his expertise. "To get more exposure for my content, I do a regular guest appearance on America's Car Show syndicated radio show and I have the Squidoo lens, which I use to funnel people to my All Info About site. There's not much maintenance required in Squidoo, and it drives traffic, so it is worth doing. I also started a Squidoo group with other people who have auto repair lenses, and we’ve got some people who provide information on hybrid cars."

Squidoo is not just for companies and independent consultants. Consider Global Action Foundation (GAF), a nonprofit organization started by a group of young professionals who work to eradicate extreme poverty. The GAF promotes their efforts (such as a project the group has begun in Sierra Leone to support amputees and their families) via the organization’s Squidoo lens. The GAF lens includes photos depicting the extreme poverty conditions that GAF helps to eradicate, links to the blog written by young American medical student John Daniel Kelly (who is a driving force behind GAF), and links for making online donations. This lens successfully portrays GAF work via the comprehensive content, and it encourages people to contribute.

If it's Springtime, it must be conference season!

With my new book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly due out in early June, I am hitting the road and speaking at a bunch of interesting conferences and events. I hope to meet some of you in person.

At each of these events, I will present my ideas on reaching buyers directly with online thought leadership based content. I tell stories and use a lot of case studies. It's really fun to deliver my stuff on stage because so many people in my typical audience have not heard about "the new rules" of reaching buyers. The transformation from skeptical to believer in just an hour is awesome to see.

Software 2007
 - May 9, 2007 - Santa Clara, CA
"Innovation is alive. Investment is growing. Business is booming. Witness the rebirth of enterprise software first-hand at Software 2007, the largest vendor-neutral gathering of industry leaders ever assembled."

Software Marketing Perspectives - May 24, 2007 - Cambridge, Massachusetts
"Two days of intense conference programming will keep technology product managers in this relative young and very dynamic industry well-informed and well-connected."

BookExpo America - June 2, 2007 - New York, New York
"BookExpo America combines the largest selection of English language titles on the planet with special industry and author events and unparalleled educational content."

National Investor Relations Institute - June 5, 2007 - Orlando, FL
"The 2007 Annual Conference of the National Investor Relations Institute is themed Ahead of the Curve: Getting There. Staying There and delivers investor relations knowledge and learn best practices you can apply at your company." At the NIRI event, my presentation has been sponsored by NASDAQ (thank you guys).

2007 Vocus Users Conference - June 7, 2007 – Washington, DC
"Join Vocus as we celebrate 15 years of growth, innovation, and success at our 2007 Users' Conference. The Vocus Users Conference is the only event of its kind, designed specifically to help public relations and government affairs professionals enhance their effectiveness by networking with other Vocus customers and learning from industry experts. This year's event will be the biggest yet and promises to offer something for everyone."

I am particularly looking forward to the Vocus event. Vocus recently acquired press release distribution company PRWeb, a company I have greatly admired for empowering marketers and PR People to reach buyers directly through news distribution. Now Vocus has offerings for the entire PR value chain. The company is doing great having just completed a very successful secondary offering which followed one of the best performing IPOs in the last 18 months (up over 150%). Who says PR isn’t strategic? Thanks to my friends at Vocus for inviting me to participate in what appears to be an interesting event.

DIRECTIONS 2007 - June 19,2007 - Carlsbad, California
"DIRECTIONS 2007 from Hanley Wood will bring together some of the best thinkers and doers from inside and outside the custom building industry to address global issues critical to the success of their business."

If you are attending any of these events, please stop by and say hello! If you are looking for a dynamic speaker for your next event, please contact me.

Marketing online? Don't forget to ask for the order!

A common mistake with Web marketing programs is that people are so busy marketing and communicating and being "on message" that they forget to just ask for the damn order! It's silly. Many companies spend thousands (or millions) of dollars on some slick online marketing campaign to convince people of something but they forget to make it easy for people to buy the product.

For several years I have maintained a simple email newsletter. I only send out six issues a year and it is primarily designed for people who don’t read my blog. If you are reading this, the email newsletter is NOT for you... I had been using the Microsoft List Builder Service to send it out.

Last week I got a message: "Microsoft retiring List Builder Service."

Effective 12:00 noon PDT on June 1st 2007 Microsoft will retire its List Builder service. To help you transition away from the service, we are giving you free service for a limited period of time, and providing instructions for exporting your subscriber data and saving your campaign reports. Please read below for more details including when you will see changes.

We understand how important keeping in touch with your subscribers is, whether they are customers or other interest groups with whom you communicate. To continue serving your subscribers with newsletters and other customer communications, we invite you to learn how you can sign up for e-mail marketing services with Constant Contact.

Yikes. How I hate to change things like online marketing tools.

Since I am pressed for time and I was already familiar with Constant Contact, I decided to just sign up for the service through the link provided. I didn’t need to be convinced. The deal was already done based on the email from Microsoft.

Unbelievably, I couldn't buy the Constant Contact product! They didn’t want me to become a customer! Wow!

There were three options on the landing page TAKE A TOUR and PRICING and FREE 60-DAY TRIAL (which basically sucks because you can only send to 100 names).

Come on guys, what about BUY NOW!

Nope, it wasn’t there.

I called the toll free number and signed up right way, but the experience was very frustrating. The person I spoke with was friendly and knowledgeable but I just wanted it to be a simple one-step process and all online.

As you are developing your own online programs, don’t forget to ask for the order and make it easy for people to buy.

Hey, as long as I'm on the subject, are you ready to pre order a copy of my new book? The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly is available on Amazon. Pre-order now from this link and it will ship to you in late May.

(There I asked for the order).

PR agencies and spam

To paraphrase the Wikipedia entry, spam is sending email that is both unsolicited by the recipient and sent in substantively identical form to many recipients.

Unfortunately, way too many PR agencies are spammers.

Do you get email like this?: "I am Mrs. Ivanka Petroslovka and my late husband was oil minister of the Ukrane and I want to send you $24,000,000 (US dollar twenty four million only)."

Or like this?" "You Won the Euro Mega Lottery!"

Much of the crap I get from PR agencies is exactly the same. Spam. It is a broadcast email message sent by a PR agency to a huge number of journalists with the hope that some poor sucker is on deadline and will respond.

Ugh.

These days, you can find the e-mail addresses of reporters in seconds, either through commercial services that sell subscriptions to their databases of thousands of journalists or simply by using a search engine. Unfortunately, way too many PR people are spamming journalists with unsolicited and unrelenting commercial messages in the form of news releases and untargeted broadcast pitches.

In the last few days, I have received unsolicited broadcast spam press releases or PR pitches for:
> A new series of Latino books
> Revolutionary new user authentication technology
> A photography festival's lineup of artists
> The emerging leader in secure network access solutions opening its second development centre in Pune, India.
> How to manage today's threats to homeland security
> Somebody who is speaking at the Christians in Cable breakfast during The Cable Show '07

Some of the press releases and PR pitches are so utterly awful and so wildly off target to what I write about that I cannot even decide if they are conventional spam for the masses or spam for poor overworked journalists.

PR people need to stop shotgun-blasting news releases and blind pitches to hundreds (or even thousands) of journalists at a time—without giving any thought to what each reporter actually covers—just because the media databases make it so darn simple to do.

Please stop spamming.

Barraging large groups of journalists with indiscriminate PR materials is not a good strategy to get reporters and editors to pay attention to you.

OK, I'll admit that I didn't get as much sleep as I had hoped last night. My wife would say I was a little cranky in the morning. So, do you think maybe I am being too harsh?

I know that many PR agencies are terrific—their smart staffers craft individual pitches for reporters based on what they cover. Are you in this category? If so, your work is being dragged down by the action of the PR agency spammers.

The New Rules of Marketing and PR final book jacket!

Things are now happening very quickly with the production of my latest book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly. The cover is finalized and I think it is great!

Last week I finished my final review of the galley proof of the book and this week I need to review the index (ugh—not fun).

I'm told that books will ship from Amazon and the other online booksellers in late May, so if you want to be one of the first to get your own copy as soon as they are released, now is the time to pre-order. Bulk purchases at a discount are available from Barnes & Noble.

I'm thrilled that Robert Scoble, Vice President Media Development, PodTech.net and co-author of Naked Conversations has written a foreword to the book. Watch this space – I will share the foreword here in a few weeks. Thank you Robert.

Also, I would like to thank the following people for kindly taking the time to read an early draft of the book and provide me with endorsements that appear either on the back cover or on the inside front of the book.

Jay Conrad Levinson, The Father of Guerrilla Marketing and Author, Guerrilla Marketing series of books

Mark Levy, Co-author of How to Persuade People Who Don't Want to be Persuaded and founder of Levy Innovation: A Marketing Strategy Firm

Don Dunnington, president of the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC), director of business communications, at K-Tron International, and graduate instructor in online communication at Rowan University in Glassboro, New Jersey.

Roy Young, Chief Revenue Officer, MarketingProfs.com and co-author Marketing Champions: Practical Strategies for Improving Marketing's Power, Influence and Business Impact

Chris Heuer, Co-Founder, Social Media Club

Phil Myers, President, Pragmatic Marketing

Ron Peck, Executive Director of the Neurological Disease Foundation

Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director, CMO Council

Roger C. Parker, author, The Streetwise Guide to Relationship Marketing on the Internet and Design to Sell

I hope you like the cover design as much as I do! Thanks to everyone who has helped me to write this book over the past year!

Here is the front flap copy

And the back flap copy

Check Me Out on MySpace: Social Networking Sites and Marketing

The popularity of social networking sites including MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga is phenomenal. Social networking sites make it easy for people to create a profile about themselves and use it to create a virtual network of their offline friends and to make new friends online. According to comScore Media Metrix, MySpace had 55 million unique visitors and Facebook 14 million unique visitors in August of 2006. Of course, not all visitors to these sites create their own profile, but there are millions and millions of people who do create one to share their photos, journals, videos, music, and interests with a network of friends.

CHECK ME OUT ON MYSPACE

Marketing on these sites can be tricky because the online community at social networking sites hates overt commercial messages. Acceptable marketing and promotion usually involves an offline personality creating a page on a social networking site to build and expand an online following. It is common for members of rock bands to have a MySpace page. For example, Boston-based rock band Guster has a popular MySpace page with a network as of this writing of 92,798 friends. Another band that does a good job with social networking is The Alternate Routes. Their MySpace page has 13,465 friends.

Volkswagen has taken a different approach. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, marketers at Volkswagen created a MySpace profile page for Helga, the German character who appears in some of the company's TV commercials. Visitors learn Helga's Likes ("I love the smell of gasoline. Gears turning, oil burning, stomach churning. Go fast or go home. Efficiency") and Dislikes ("'Pimped rides,' bumper balls, people in the left lane going 40 with the blinker on. Traffic. Scorpios, you can't trust them"). You can download ringtones, images of Helga, and short audio clips in Helga's strong German accent. My favorite Helga clip: "My xenon headlights are on." I've listened to it like 20 times. The Helga MySpace page works because Helga is very clearly a made up character and she is fun. Yes, this is advertising. However, it works (she has 8,418 friends) because Helga is seen as an interesting, slightly offbeat (although made up) online character.

Yet another tactic that some smart nonprofit organizations use is to encourage employees to establish a personal page, with details of the cause they support, as a way to spread the word. Supporters of political candidates (as well as some candidates themselves such as John Edwards) create pages on social networking sites too. As with all good marketing, it is important to create content that is right for the people who you want to reach.

If you are considering a strategy to get yourself out there and onto a social networking site for marketing and PR purposes, just remember that authenticity and transparency are critical. Don't try to fool the community into thinking that the page is something that it is not. Frequent eruptions within these communities happen when members uncover a fraud of some kind, such as an advertising agency creating fake profiles for people to promote products. Yes, you can use social networking sites such as MySpace to build a following, but the approaches that bands like Guster, companies like Volkswagen, and people like John Edwards take work best; avoid sleazy fake profiles of people who supposedly use your products.

Knifing the competition… and it's all caught on video

Here is an interesting case study on using videos for marketing purposes that will appear in my upcoming book The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to use news releases, blogs, podcasts, viral marketing and online media to reach your buyers directly

Owen Mack, cofounder and head of strategy and development for coBRANDiT, a company that does social media video production, is a pioneer in using video for marketing and PR purposes. From the early days of online video Mack has helped companies like PUMA and Pabst Brewing create video strategies.

"Video is an extension of the blogging ethos," Mack says. "Do you have an interesting story to tell? If you don't, can you develop something? You need to see what people are saying about you already and know how you can mesh with that. Transparency and openness is required. Done properly, video is very compelling."

Mack has taken his interest and expertise in online video to help create video content to market products for a kitchen retail store his family owns in Boston called KitchenArts; it's basically a hardware store for cooks. "We have a staff of only four people, but we launched a Vlog," he says. "We shoot quick and dirty video about the things that we sell, like how to use kitchen knives. We use a $300 camera, and then we link to our eBay store where people can buy—this is the low-cost, grassroots way to do video."

Mack's use of video for KitchenArts has allowed the small company to present information in a way that the big players aren't. "Our competition is places like Williams-Sonoma," he says. "I can't compete with them by doing a better web site. But I can do a better job with video. I can transmit the ethos and show the personality and demonstrate knowledge of our products on the Web. It's basically home video, but we show how to use things and demonstrate products, so we compete with the big guys. It's also cheap. The eBay store and blog software combined is only about $50 a month."

KitchenArts has nearly 100 different products for sale online, each with a short video demonstration segment. "It's not making barrel-loads of money, but the sales we make from video as a percentage of my extremely low costs represent terrific margins."

Mack sees video as an important component in an effective marketing mix. "For brands big and small, it's just about putting out interesting and engaging information about your story," he says. "Anybody can do it. The bigger companies can build brand communities to excite brand loyalists and advocates. In this way, video extends the two-way dialog of the blog."

Audio and video content on the Web are still very new for marketers and communicators. But the potential to deliver information to buyers in new and surprising ways is greater when you use a new media. And while your competition is still trying to figure out "that blogging thing," you can leverage your existing blog into the new worlds of audio and video and leave the competition way behind.