Web Ink Now

Understanding an audience and creating great content

At every speech I give, I suggest one of the best ways to create great Web content is for companies to hire a journalist, either full or part time, to create it. Journalists (print or broadcast) are great at understanding an audience and developing information that buyers want to consume.

At a recent speaking gig in North Carolina, I met Kathy Boyd who works in corporate communications at Neighborhood America, a company that creates enterprise social networks for organizations to reach consumers.

Kathy is exactly the sort of person I'm talking about. She studied Mass Media Communications and Broadcast Journalism at Florida State. Upon graduation, she spent a few years as a TV reporter for WFTX-TV, the Fox affiliate in Ft Myers, Florida.

After Kathy honed her journalism skills as a TV reporter, she joined Neighborhood America and now works on the company's corporate newsletter, produces some stellar videos, and develops customer case examples.

Here are two videos Kathy created that you must check out.

The first one is a video case study of Adidas, a Neighborhood America client Adidas Goes Mobile At NBA All-Star Week 2007. Note how different this approach to a case example is compared to most written case examples that are either a) dreadfully boring or b) prattle on about the product or c) both.

This next video Mission Impossible: So, What Does Your Company Do? is Kathy’s video riff on my Gobbledygook Manifesto. After hearing me talk about gobbledygook, Kathy thought it would be fun to cleverly capture interesting information about Neighborhood America in a fun and approachable way. It works, don't you think?

Well done, Kathy. And kudos to Neighborhood America for taking a chance on hiring a journalist to do marketing instead of the "safe" route of hiring someone with a traditional marketing background.

How about your company? When will you hire a journalist?

CNN: Time to retire the inane "best political team on television" phrase

I'm enjoying the US Presidential race. As a marketer, it is fascinating to see how the candidates position themselves. And as a frequent keynote speaker at conferences, I also enjoy the snippets of candidates speaking on the stump.

Each primary night, I channel surf for hours as the returns come in.

Is it just me, or is CNN's slogan: "The best political team on television" incredibly annoying? I was watching CNN recently for about twenty minutes and I heard Wolf Blitzer utter the inane phrase three times. So I clicked over to MSNBC because it pissed me off so much. A bit later I came back to CNN and he said it again. Yikes! What’s up with that?

A search of CNN transcripts on Dow Jones Factiva reveals that the phrase has been used on air about 200 times in the past 30 days and 16 times on Super Tuesday alone.

A phrase like "The best political team on television" might be OK as an advertising slogan for billboards and magazine ads, because you want people to give CNN a try. But it is incredibly silly for the anchorman to keep saying it on air during the editorial content of a program - we are already watching!

There is no need to coerce viewers into continuing to watch your coverage. Anyone who is into politics enough to watch primary results instead of American Idol or ESPN or something else on TV has already made up their minds about what channels to watch and who has the best coverage. Don't interrupt our enjoyment with advertising in the form of silly catch phrases during the editorial content.

I'll be watching the Wisconsin and Hawaii primary results this evening.

Attention Wolf Blitzer and CNN: It's time to retire that stupid phrase.

Ask me anything about Viral Marketing

UPDATE - Due to a scheduling problem with the technology provider, the live event needs to be postponed to Tuesday March 4, 2008 at 6:00PM eastern time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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I'll be on a live teleseminar Tuesday February 26th, 2008 at 5:00 PM EST to discuss viral marketing in depth.

For about 70 minutes, I'll answer questions that you submit to me and discuss the issues people face with going viral. It's free to participate. I hope you can make it.

Mike Sigers, of Simplenomics kindly offered to host the live Q&A with me. Mike will do the Q part and I'll do the A part. To submit a question for Mike to ask me, please go to the New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site. You'll have an opportunity to post the question and then get the dial in information.

If you can't participate live, ask your question anyway. The New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site will have the replay as an MP3 the morning after the live event.

Video mashups: Easy to create and informative for visitors

Alert readers of this blog know that I am a believer in the power of YouTube videos for any organization to show the world what they are doing. Video, done well, is great marketing.

Many people (particularly those from large companies) push back and say things like: "We can't do a video like Blendtec's Will it Blend – that seems too difficult. Besides, we’re a _______ company." (Fill in the blank with conservative, B2B, nonprofit, famous, startup, or some other excuse for not doing videos).

Well, there's an option. Why not do a video interview program that's essentially a mashup of the audio from a telephone interview with someone of interest to your market, with some in-house video.

WebProNews does a great job with this format. Kara Ratliff interviewed me on the phone for about a half hour and then condensed the conversation into just under four minutes in the studio.

Watch WebProNews Publicizing Your Blog

I've had many people tell me they’ve seen the video and there are 16 comments as of this writing. Clearly people are interested in this format.

Here's another example, WebProNews Reporter Kara Ratliff takes a look into how you can make money from blogging through syndication. She talked with President of Newstex, Larry Schwartz about benefits and disadvantages, along with other various topics of syndication.

Kara uses audio from Larry plus some video footage of him from the BlogWorldExpo conference and a bunch of screen shots. I syndicate my blog through Newstex (and, disclosure here, I am on the board of advisors of Newstex). Despite being affiliated with Newstex for several years, this is probably the best explanation of blog syndication I've ever seen and the video mashup format is what makes it work.

So if your company is considering some YouTube videos but you think that the funny viral stuff may not be for you, consider a video mashup like these from WebProNews. You can interview people in your industry, perhaps some customer, partners, and analysts, add in your own analysis, and pop the videos up onto YouTube.

New Rules of Viral Marketing update and free virtual book tour teleseminar

It's been twenty days since I released my new ebook The New Rules of Viral Marketing: How word-of-mouse spreads your ideas for free.

I'm amazed at the stats. In just 20 days:
> 42,810 downloads (based on my Web analytics)
> Close to 100 blog posts about the ebook (depends on which blog search engine is used)
> Well over 1,000 hits on the exact phrase "new rules of viral marketing" (on the day I put out the ebook there were zero hits on the phrase.)

How did I achieve these results?

I didn't do a thing. I didn't beg the media to write about it. I didn't pay for expensive advertising to promote it. I didn't interrupt people by sending it out via email.

All I did was post it on my blog. That's it. You did the rest. Thank you for downloading the ebook and for talking about it.

(Well, I guess I can safely say that my viral marketing ebook has gone viral.)

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UPDATE - Due to a scheduling problem with the technology provider, the live event needs to be postponed to Tuesday March 4, 2008 at 6:00PM eastern time. Sorry for the inconvenience.

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I'll be on a live teleseminar Tuesday February 26th, 2008 at 5:00 PM EST to discuss viral marketing in depth. For about 70 minutes, I'll answer questions that you submit to me and discuss the issues people face with going viral. It's free to participate. I hope you can make it.

Mike Sigers, of Simplenomics kindly offered to host the live Q&A with me. Mike will do the Q part and I'll do the A part. Mike is a sales and marketing consultant who simply tries to help people find easier, simpler ways to sell more and market their products and services for less cost with bigger results.

To submit a question for Mike to ask me, please go to the New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site. You'll have an opportunity to post the question and then get the dial in information.

Your questions are really important to me. As I learn more about viral marketing and more about what you want to know about viral marketing, I will be creating more information about how to spread your ideas for free. The questions help me to speak, write, and produce the most valuable information.

If you don't want to ask a question, but would like to listen in, that's cool too. Please go here.

If you can't participate live, ask your question anyway. The New Rules of Viral Marketing Virtual Book Tour site will have the replay as an MP3 the morning after the live event.

Thank you for spreading my ideas.

Personal branding, great design, and a new masthead

I'm a huge believer in the power of personal branding on the Web. How cool is it that you can create interesting content that people want to read and share? Things like ebooks, blogs, YouTube videos and the like show the world your passions. And then interested people seek you out.

For nearly a decade, my favorite designer is a genius named Doug Eymer. I worked with Doug in my last corporate VP marketing job and continued using Doug to create killer designs for two of my book covers – Eyeball Wars and Cashing in with Content. Doug also designed my Web site and my two most popular ebooks The New Rules of PR and The New Rules of Viral Marketing.

I commissioned Doug to do a new masthead for my blog. The direction I gave Doug was that I wanted to convey through the masthead the ideas I talk about, particularly the concept that you can create great content on the Web and that you don't need to rely on expensive advertising or begging the media to get noticed.

I also wanted to carry consistency of my designs through my various publishing endeavors. The blog masthead was the one thing that had been a little "off" because the old design (which I liked very much) was done by a different person.

Here is the old masthead

My friend, the positioning guru Mark Levy, says of the new masthead: "Doug nailed it, David. It's perfect. It's energetic, passionate, and shows the power of the individual's mind and voice in action. Bravo."

I think Doug did a great job, don't you?

(Note – if you're reading this soon after I changed mastheads today and you're seeing my old masthead, you may need to hit refresh on your browser.)

Thanks Doug!

Why most CMOs get fired

A few weeks ago I get a call from Gary Stern, a columnist for Investors Business Daily.

Gary says, "I'm doing a story on the average tenure of Chief Marketing Officers, which is only 26 months. This is much shorter than 44 months, which is how long CEOs last. Can you comment?"

"Oh, boy can I," I say. "How much time do you have?"

(I could talk about this all day.)

We ended up talking for about a half hour. Basically I ranted. A lot.

I didn't give my opinions in quite this way, but here's a few ideas to let you know what I think:

> CMOs get fired because they would rather spend money on a PR agency to spam the media than be thought leaders that the media seeks out.

> CMOs get fired because they measure themselves on leads and press clips instead of what the marketplace thinks about their company and its products and services.

> CMOs get fired because they would rather spend millions on TV commercials than figure out how to get a free YouTube video that goes viral.

> CMOs get fired because they ________ (fill in the blank – there are many more reasons).

(And once they are fired and are looking for a new job, ex-CMOs obsess about resumes and networking and spamming people via LinkedIn instead of blogging, speaking, and writing about what they are passionate about.)

Gary did a terrific job with the article. It is slated for the print edition of IBD on Monday February 4. But here is a sneak peek via CNN online:

How To Move CMOs Out Of Harm's Way

Gary's article begins:
"Warning: If you're seeking job security, don't think about becoming a chief marketing officer. Over the last few months, the CMOs of Home Depot, Wendy's, Rite Aid, and Chico's CHS changed over."

Read the rest of How To Move CMOs Out Of Harm's Way

Do you know this person? Is it you?

Practically every day, people ask me for help and advice in creating the sorts of new rules marketing and PR that I speak about and write about.

This is always a difficult request that I never really know how to answer.

"Read my book and my blog" sounds egotistical.
"Attend my seminar" sounds like a sales pitch.
"I don’t know" sounds like I'm an idiot.

About 6 months ago, I put a little note on my site that went like this: "Please note: Due to the tremendous success of my latest book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, except for seminars, I am unable to take on new consulting clients at this time."

However, some people really need help and support, both full time and part time. Many companies are looking for smart people.

So I wanted to create a sort of new rules of marketing & pr job description. The idea for this came from Jeff Ernst, VP marketing at Kadient (I'm on the Kadient board of directors). Jeff has an open position right now and this is how he described what he's looking for:

"She (or he) created her Facebook profile well before any of her buddies did, then encouraged them all to join, and now has 700 friends on Facebook. She writes her own blog where she talks about her favorite bands. She loves to experiment with new ways to drive traffic to her blog. She's read David Meerman Scott’s book The New Rules of Marketing & PR, and is passionate about combining her love for social media with her work by applying the new rules in a B2B marketing environment. "

(I think Jeff was buttering me up with that last sentence, don't you).

Jeff says: "This doesn’t sound like the typical marketing job description."

I agree. But new rules marketing & PR isn't a typical marketing job.

I'd add a few other random things to our emerging alternative job description:

1. You're curious about new things and always try stuff like Skype, Second Life, Twitter, Ryze, XING, digg, and reddit early. But you are busy and there is so much to do so you don't keep up with the things you try (like Second Life for example) and you don't feel the least bit guilty when you leave a network.

2. You know that the bosses who tell you that ROI and leads and clipbooks are the most important measurements are dead wrong. To prove it, you are building up evidence that the things you're doing outside the traditional stuff -- like commenting on blogs, focusing on the phrases people use to search and tossing out a few online news releases -- are beneficial. But its tough because you really have two jobs -- a full time role in new marketing that you know is the way to go, and a full time role with the traditional crap to keep your bosses happy.

3. You don't "go online" and you don't "use the internet" because your physical life and virtual life are one in the same.

4. If you are located in the US, you follow the presidential election, but do so online and salivate at the thought of investing the sort of money that the candidates are spending on TV ads to implement a bunch of cool viral initiatives.

Does this sound like you? If so, you've got an amazing career in front of you.

Got something to add to the job description? Please add other thoughts to this ongoing riff.

Looking for a job? Maybe post a comment here with a link to your blog or Facebook page and someone in a cool company will find you.