Web Ink Now

Most PR people are spammers - Chris Anderson now blocks you and I may be next

At every one of my speeches, I say PR people are spammers. That gets everyone's attention so I have an opportunity to explain what I mean.

I get several hundred unsolicited press releases and PR pitches every week. Well over 99% of them are not targeted to me, instead they are sent to me because I am on various PR people’s lists because of this blog, because of my books, and because I am a contributing editor to EContent Magazine and have written for a bunch of other publications. I’m getting the identical piece of spam email as hundreds of other poor journalists.

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.

Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired Magazine and author of The Long Tail recently lamented that he gets 300 emails a day and he’s had it. So he's blocked PR people and has published a list of those blocked on his blog.

Chris says: "So fair warning: I only want two kinds of email: those from people I know, and those from people who have taken the time to find out what I'm interested in and composed a note meant to appeal to that (I love those emails; indeed, that's why my email address is public)."

I couldn't agree more.

At my speaking gigs, after I get people's attention by saying PR people are spammers and describe the worst practices, I also offer ideas how to be successful with the media:

> Read our blogs.
> Comment on our blogs.
> Read our books.
> Read our publications (or watch & listen to our TV & radio shows).
> Attend our speaking gigs.
> Publish your own blog.
> Send well-crafted, personal email telling us something that is interesting and helpful.

I kind of like the idea of blocking the PR people who spam and naming names on this blog...

A Brand You World Global Summit - free and just a phone call away

Mark your calendars for Thursday November 8, 2007 because A Brand You World 2007 Global Summit is happening. It's totally free and you participate by phone.

In celebration of the 10th anniversary of Tom Peters' thought provoking-article on Personal Branding "The Brand Called You" published in Fast Company, A Brand You World will be the biggest global event of its kind ever on the subject of personal branding. The goal of the organizers is to reach 100,000 people.

During the day, a total of 24 telephone seminars (including mine) will take place.

What a great lineup. I've shared the podium with some of the speakers and participated on podcasts with others. Most I have admired from afar. How cool to be in the company of people like: Jason Alba, William Arruda, Richard Nelson Bolles, Anita Bruzzese, Silvia Cambié, Krishna De, Kirsten Dixson, Stewart Emery, Phil Gerbyshak, T Scott Gross, Thebe Ikalafeng, Nevile Hobson, John Jantsch, Catherine Kaputa, Guy Kawasaki, Andrea Kay, Liz Ryan, Andy Sernovitz, Debbie Weil, Susan Whitcomb, Carol Wilson, and Martin Yate.

Holy cow, the authors of these books are speaking and you can sit in for free: What Color is Your Parachute? (Bolles), The Art of the Start (Kawasaki), Duct Tape Marketing (Jantsch), The Corporate Blogging Book (Weil), Word of Mouth Marketing (Sernovitz), and many others. Here are speaker bios.

Here's how the event works: There will be a full day of teleseminars running period of 12 hours on November 8 starting at 7am Los Angeles, 10am New York, 3pm London, 4pm Paris, and 10pm Hong Kong/Singapore. To participate, all you have to do is register online. The complete details including descriptions of each teleseminar will be posted on the site in the next few days.

Thanks to platinum sponsor Conference Calls Unlimited, the entire event is free (except for the cost of your outbound phone calls). Hey, you can use Skype to make it nearly free for those too.

You should consider participating in the event if you are interested in enhancing your personal brand or if you're looking to advance your career. Just pick a speaker or two and sit in on the call. Or take the day off and listen to a bunch of them.

I will be presenting at 4:00pm eastern time. My topic is "Promoting Brand You with Viral Marketing on the Web." Here’s a description of what I'll present: Everyone has an amazing opportunity to promote Brand You via the Web (for free) but few understand the power available to them. The new spheres of influence include blogs, YouTube, podcasting, chat rooms & forums, direct-to-consumer news releases, social networks, search engines, and much more. Smart people who participate in online conversations become well known and sell themselves as a result.

I'm thrilled that Krishna De, Europe's leading personal branding and marketing strategist, will be interviewing me. Krishna is a key organizer of the Brand You World Global Summit and I thank her for inviting me to participate.

Seinfeld on Marketing - check out this terrific free ebook

Bill Gammell recently released a terrific free ebook Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing lessons from the cast of "the show about nothing"

Not only is Seinfeld on Marketing a fun read, the lessons are fundamental and applicable to all.

Bill writes: "All this time we thought Seinfeld was a show about 'nothing'. Little did we know that peppered in its nine seasons were hidden, real-world marketing lessons taught from the masters themselves. But unlike the Soup Nazi's secret soup recipes, these marketing lessons are to be shared freely with everyone. In fact (to loosely quote Elaine Benes when she discovered the secret recipes of the short-tempered Soup Nazi), feel free to give these lessons to every marketer in town..."

I agree with Bill, who says: "You don’t even have to be a lover of Seinfeld to understand and apply the marketing concepts. So if you are a newbie, I'll hold your hand and walk you through them. If you wear your 'puffy shirt' on casual Friday's, I'm sure you'll be just fine."

Ebooks, the hip and stylish younger sister to the nerdy white paper are a great way to tell your story.

Check out Seinfeld on Marketing: 7 Marketing lessons from the cast of "the show about nothing"

Do not read this blog post

So you're reading this post, huh? Kind of a compelling title, isn’t it?

Why is that?

I have strong evidence that "negative" Web headlines and links often generate lots more clicks than "positive" ones. For example, my Worst Practices blog category gets more clicks than any other category on this blog.

Several years ago I worked on a site where we included a link "For Executives Only" and this generated more traffic than other links. It turns out people react to negatives. Words like "Worst", "Not", "Don't", and "Only" are interesting and people want to know what’s there.

My friend Jonathan Kranz experienced the same phenomenon with a link on his Web site: 10 Important Reasons NOT to Hire Me. Jonathan says: "that negative word, 'NOT,' attracts attention. Some people wonder why I would deliberately discourage business. More experienced marketers understand that I'm qualifying my prospects, and come to see how I manage it. Others are simply curious."

Try it!

The Web allows us to try new things and implement new ideas quickly, get people to check out it live, and then make changes to on the fly. Try a "negative" link and if that Web page that doesn’t work for you, you can just delete it. (You can’t do that with a print ad or direct-mail campaign).

Take a look at your site and find a link that you can flip around. Measure the traffic before and after the switch and see what works better. If there is a dramatic difference, let me know and I may blog about it.

Positive
> Negative

"How to increase productivity and drive revenue"
> "How to destabilize productivity, deter customers, and diminish revenue"

"Check out our online media room"
> "Our online media room -- for journalists and analysts only"

While the "negative" technique most certainly works, it should be used sparingly. Usually, only one negative link is appropriate.

And don't forget -- there must be something compelling and interesting to read once people click! Don't promise something interesting with a negative headline and then fail to deliver.

When people do click through, the landing page should immediately signal that you're having fun. Don't be too subtle. Don't let people think that you really are being negative or exclusionary.

Forrester Research misleads CMOs by confusing advertising with marketing in new research report

UPDATE November 5, 2007

This afternoon I had a conversation with Shar Van Boskirk, the author of the Forrester US interactive marketing forecast report that I talk about below and Tracy Sullivan, Senior Public Relations Specialist at Forrester Research. They also sent me a copy of the report.

I want to thank them for reaching out to me. Clearly Forrester is monitoring blogs and engaging bloggers. Good for them. Very few companies that I talk about in this blog contact me.

Van Boskirk provided some additional information and clarification about the research which was designed as a way to do market sizing of social media. As she explained, in many cases (such as YouTube) the only way to measure how much marketing activity is going on is to measure advertising and use that as a proxy for total spend. After all, it’s not like companies have a YouTube budget that could be quantified. Forrester analysts also looked at things like agency fees and spending on technology.

I agree. It is difficult to measure marketing in many social media and advertising spend is a decent proxy for the interest in the area among marketers. However, I still believe marketing and advertising are very different and some aspects of the way the report was described in the news release and landing pages was misleading.

Sullivan said that the press release has been added to the media room pages.

+++++++++++++++++++

ORIGINAL POST

Last week Forrester Research "an independent technology and market research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology" released a report called US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012, written by Shar VanBoskirk. I have not read the report, but have seen the news release about it as well as the summary of the report on the Forrester site.

Some of the highlights of the report include:
> "Interactive Spend Will Better Align With Consumers' Media Behavior"
> "Interactive Marketing Will Top $61 Billion By 2012"
> "Search Marketing Will Triple In Five Years"
> "Online Video Ads Perpetuate A Virtuous Cycle Of Growth"
> "Social Media Will Drive Emerging Channels To $10.6 Billion By 2012"

While this data is certainly interesting, I am dismayed that the statistics refer to interactive advertising spending. In my opinion, it is misleading for Forrester to use MARKETING when they really mean ADVERTISING.

As readers of this blog and The New Rules of Marketing & PR will recall:

OLD RULES -- buy your way in with advertising and beg your way in with the media
NEW RULES -- publish your way in on the Web for free

As far as I can tell, this report is about the old rules of marketing (buying your way in) but just applied to the web. As I've said many times, marketers have long-term ingrained habits. Many of us assume that we must spend money to play the game. We equate marketing with advertising (as Forrester has done).

However, as many successful marketers know, on the Web, marketing is not the same as advertising. Marketing is all about creating great content. For free. To be successful, you must unlearn what you have learned.

It's not about advertising on YouTube, it is about making a YouTube video. It's not about advertising on social media sites like Facebook, it is about participating by creating profiles, groups and events on Facebook.

I like Forrester's work. In my last corporate job as VP marketing for a technology company, I was a Forrester client. Some of the companies I work with are Forrester clients. I have found their research valuable.

There is something deeply troubling in VanBoskirk's quote at the end of the press release. "These changes will not only affect the budget structure of marketing organizations, but it will also give interactive marketing professionals a more legitimate seat at the marketing table," VanBoskirk continues. "In fact, with interactive marketing gaining executive visibility as much for its popularity with young consumers as for its measurability and cost effectiveness, we see a class of marketers emerging who will involve themselves with a few high-profile interactive experiments in order to catapult themselves into the CMO seat."

In my opinion, advertising people already had their chance in the CMO seat and they've screwed it up. We've already got CMOs who understand the 30-second TV spot and who are skilled at interruption techniques. That's not marketing. That's not what consumers want. That's why the average tenure as CMO is less than two years according to Spencer Stuart.

Businesses certainly don't need trade CMOs who know TV ads with those who know how to run banner ads on YouTube and Facebook.

Instead, we need CMOs who know how to resonate with potential customers. We need CMOs who are skilled at creating products and services that people want to buy. Instead of dreaming up "creative" ads to interrupt people and shout "buy my product," we need CMOs who are Tuned In to their marketplace. We need CMOs who connect with buyers by publishing great content on the Web.

Here's another interesting thing. When I was writing this blog post on October 15 (four days after the Forrester report had come out), I had wanted to point to the press release on the Forrester site to drive any traffic from this blog to them directly. But the Forrester press release is not on the Forrester site, so I am pointing to it on Yahoo.

I entered the phrase US Interactive Marketing Spending To Reach $61 Billion (the headline of the press release) into Google and (at least the time that I looked) none of the top 50 hits pointed to the Forrester site.

While I completely advocate using the news release wires to send releases, they should also be published on a company's online media room. Maybe it was just an oversight on Forrester’s part.

The new rules of marketing and PR is about publishing interesting content that people want to consume and bringing them back to your own site where they can learn more.

Check out This Week on IAOC blog

I've participated in several guest blogger gigs at the International Association of Online Communicators (IAOC) and have enjoyed the great participation. You can see an example at Direct to Consumer News Releases: Do they suck?

The Fall 2007 season of This Week on IAOCblog takes place from Oct. 15 - Nov 16, 2007. Each week, an industry expert blogs about a hot topic in online marketing & PR.

I'm happy to see some friends and blogging buddies on the calendar including Dianna Huff, Ted Demopoulos & Shel Horowitz.

The Fall season kicked off September 24 with guest blogger Peter A. Gloor of MIT's Sloan School of Management, who blogged about analyzing workplace communications.

Here's upcoming the lineup:

October 15-19, 2007
 -- Dave Taylor, Blogsmart, Ask Dave Taylor
 -- Is It Okay to Get Paid to Blog?

October 22-26, 2007 
-- Ted Demopoulos, Blogging for Business
 -- Should CEOs Blog?



October 29-November 2, 2007
 -- Dianna Huff, Marcom Writer Blog
 -- Writing Search Engine Friendly Copy



November 5-9, 2007
 -- Lois Kelly, Foghound
 -- Conversational Marketing: Mood over Matter?



November 13-16, 2007 -- Shel Horowitz, Ethical Marketing Expert
 -- Blogger's Code of Ethics: News or Ruse?



Strumpette managing editor Amanda Chapel resigns role as PR industry watchdog

I've been a huge fan of Strumpette "a naked journal of the PR business" and Amanda Chapel, the nom de plume of Strumpette’s managing editor, since the site's beginnings. Strumpette is a site that dares to challenge the status quo, that isn’t scared to tell it like it is, and that takes on the vested interests in the PR business. In doing so, Amanda shows what’s wrong with much of PR as it is practiced today.

Amanda is a terrific writer. Some of her posts are so sharply written that I needed a band-aid after reading. Each post made me think. As I told Amanda, her writing influenced my book The New Rules of Marketing & PR and I was honored to recognize her in the acknowledgments.

In Amanda's retirement announcement, she says: “BUT now I am tired; and now regrettably, I seem to spend all my time revisiting the same battles previously won. I spend all my time trying to keep the Web's rising tide of small literal minds at bay. As you can imagine, it's overwhelmingly tedious and exhausting. All while the largest association of our profession is spending BIG MONEY on a veritable reenactment of 'The Masque of the Red Death'!"

I've traded emails with Amanda's handlers several times and have enjoyed the one-on-ones too. I do hope that Strumpette itself will live on and I look forward to hearing what’s next for those who worked Amanda's magic.

"You have the right to be angry with me" - Marion Jones shows how to gracefully admit guilt

We're going off on a bit of a tangent here this morning...

I've watched the emotional admission of guilt by Olympic track superstar Marion Jones several times and I'm struck by what a terrific job she did in her four minute speech. This is a must-see.

Of course, I don't condone her cheating or lying. But I find the grace and honesty in Jones' public admission to be something that is almost unheard of these days. This is one of the most powerful speeches I have heard in a long time and in it, Jones shows politicians, businesspeople, athletes, and actors how to gracefully admit guilt.

Here's a woman who just admitted in a United States District Courthouse in White Plains New York to using performance-enhancing drugs and to making false statements in two separate government investigations.

Later, when she faced her fans, family and a large media contingent to apologize for her mistakes, Jones appeared to be speaking without notes. She explained the situation, apologized personally to her family members, offered words to her loyal and supportive fans, track and field officials, all the while holding her considerable emotions in check.

It is remarkable to witness.

The International Olympic Committee will likely move to strip her of the five medals she won, including three gold, at the 2000 Olympics in Sydney, Australia. But Jones tells us that she lost a lot more.

“It is with a great amount of shame that I stand before you and tell you that I have betrayed your trust… You have the right to be angry with me. I have let them down, I have let my country down and I have let myself down.”

Facebook Applications: Silliness, spam and spoofs

Is it just me or have Facebook applications become too damn annoying?

Don't get me wrong. I think Facebook is terrific. I love when someone I know from a past life friends me. Or better yet, I am thrilled when someone who has read my book or heard me speak live connects via Facebook. I've got Facebook friends from all over the world (keep the friends requests coming folks).

As much as I like Facebook, I'm just not into the third party applications thing. I find the applications that require some sort of reply to be particularly annoying. So-and-so wants to "network using business cards" and this one "dedicated a song to you" and that one "asked her friends a question". The problem with these things is that they require action on my part. So I think of them as sort of spam-like. Sure it only takes a moment to click the ignore button, but these things seem a little outside the scope of Facebook, at least the way that I am using it.

Am I being overly harsh?

There are now 4,500 Facebook Applications, the vast majority developed by people who do not work for Facebook. In fact, this is a very hot area for Venture Capitalists to put money these days. There are sites that review and recommend applications. It's all very new and we're all learning as we go. But I predict a backlash against some of the more annoying applications.

Facebook is great for connecting. But I don’t see it as a game. I don't really want to know "What My Stripper Name Is" (Note, if you're actually a stripper, this switches to "What's Your Internetweb Geek Name") and I don’t want to use BoozeMail to "Send your friends a drink (or even a round of drinks) on Facebook." Although, I must admit I'm rather intrigued by NaughtyGirls "Get Naughty. Send very naughty gifts and very naughty messages to all of your friends."

And here's something really creepy to really gum up the works. Today I got a Facebook Application spoof email. It looked exactly like a typical Facebook request email, but when I moused over the URL, it was some dodgy address somewhere, not Facebook. Ugh.

Just when we figured out how to deal with comment spam and trackback spam, we’ve got to deal with Facebook app spam.

SocialRank launches MarketingLens and PRVoices to rate top PR and Marketing posts

Digg and reddit are great ways of learning what's popular on the web. However when you're looking for what's popular in niche blogs, the services are much less helpful. Technorati is also a good place to see what blogs are popular, but not which individual posts.

What if you're only interested in PR blog posts, or stuff about knitting or motherhood or scrapbooking and you want to know what are the hottest posts?

SocialRank has developed an algorithm that does for blog posts what Google's Pagerank does for websites. It is a mathematical deduction of the days hottest posts. The SocialRank algorithm measures blog post's popularity by looking at things like comments and links, and conversations on and off each blog and ranks them based on all blogs in that category.

This week SocialRank launched with a bunch of niche sites (even one for knitting). Two that interest me are:

PRVoices – which tracks PR blogs. I recognize many of the blogs that appear here, so it would seem that the SocialRank team has chosen well. Note that you can nominate your own blog (or another) to be ranked.

MarketingLens – looks at marketing blogs.

I spoke with the founder of SocialRank, Vishen Lakhiani, who is a true internationalist. A Malaysian, he spoke to me from his home in Estonia. "I worked at Microsoft, than in Silicon Valley, but I got tired of my job," Vishen says. "I did some internet marketing and made a bunch of money that allowed us to create several web 2.0 companies. The idea behind SocialRank sites is to show the most popular posts but without regard to popularity of the blogger. For example, Seth Godin is a very popular blogger. Anything Seth writes about, even if he just wrote about his dog, would get links. So we try to dampen the effects of his popularity to find just the ones that are important. We then rank them based on what’s hot."

The team only launched these sites yesterday, and they are working out some kinks, but they are worth a bookmark. I like what Vishen is up to and I hope they succeed. The market needs this take on what's hot.

Vishen also shared some interesting ways the team is working with their algorithm engine that may lead to some cool new offerings. Stay tuned.