Seeing the Web as a city helps make sense of each aspect of online life and how we create and interact.
Corporate sites are the storefronts on main street peddling wares. Craigslist is like the bulletin board at the entrance of the corner store; Ebay, a garage sale; Amazon, a bookstore replete with patrons anxious to give you their two cents. Mainstream media sites like The New York Times online are the newspapers of the city. Chatrooms and forums are the pubs and salons of the online world. You've even got the proverbial wrong-side-of-the-tracks spots via the Web's adult-entertainment and sp*m underbelly.
So what about social media?
I like to think of Facebook, LinkedIn and other social networking sites as the cocktail parties of the city. To extend the tortured analogy even further, Twitter is sort of like when the girls go to the ladies room and talk about the guys while the guys are discussing the girls while they are away. Photo credit: cityscapeabudhabi.com
What this means for you
Viewing the Web as a sprawling city with social media as the cocktail parties helps to make sense of the best ways for marketers to use the tools of social media. How do you act in such a situation?
Do you go into a large gathering filled with a few acquaintances and tons of people you do not know and shout "BUY MY PRODUCT"?
Do you go into a cocktail party and ask every single person you meet for a business card before you agree to speak with them?
Do you listen more than you speak?
Are you helpful, providing valuable information to people with no expectation of something tangible in return?
Do you try to meet every single person or do you have a few great conversations?
Or do you avoid the social interaction of cocktail parties all together because you are uncomfortable in such situations?
I find these questions are helpful to people who are new to social media. This analogy is a good one to discuss with social media cynics and those who cannot see the value of this important form of communication.
The Web as a city approach is especially important when dealing with people who have been steeped in the traditions of outbound marketing – interrupting people to talk up products and using the coercion techniques of advertising. Sure, you can go to a cocktail party and hit everyone up as a sales lead while blabbing on about what your company does. But that approach is unlikely to make you popular.
Guess what? The popular people on the cocktail circuit make friends. People like to do business with people they like. And they are eager to introduce their friends to each other.
So go ahead and join the party. But think of it as just that – a fun place where you give more than you get. But what you get in return are lasting friendships, many which lead to business opportunities.
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UPDATE: A few minutes after I sent this post, I learned (via @johnvlane) that there is a book with the same title as this post. I have not read the book and I do not recall seeing it. I probably should have Googled the blog title first. Apologies to Jim Tobin & Lisa Braziel authors of the book Social Media is a Cocktail Party. I should read it!
Douglas Burr points us to this amazing video called I am a craft brewer, a collaborative video representing the camaraderie, character and integrity of the American Craft Brewing movement. Created by Greg Koch, CEO of the Stone Brewing Co. with Chris and Jared of Redtail Media and featuring more than 35 amazing craft brewers from all over the country.
As I was watching this video, I kept drawing a parallel between the craft brewing movement and the "craft marketing" that I see so many people doing with great success these days. When someone like Tom Dickson can shoot videos and increase his business five fold, it's craft marketing. When Dr. Helaine Smith writes an ebook that brings tens of thousands of dollars per month in new revenue, it is craft marketing. This video which promotes craft brewing is a great example of craft marketing.
People like us who rise up against corporate-style Madison avenue advertising within their business and do something authentic online are the same as craft brewers, aren’t we?
Please watch the video and let me know if this analogy works for you or I'm just a little crazy.
The video I am a craft brewer was shown to a packed audience of 1700 craft brewers and industry members at the 2009 Craft Brewers Conference as an introduction to Greg's Keynote Speech entitled "Be Remarkable: Collaboration Ethics Camaraderie Passion."
The video ends with this quote: "One of the truest tests of integrity is its blunt refusal to be compromised." Chinua Achebe
So many of you who read this blog and my books are rising up in the face of big-budget marketing. You are the pioneers. You are going against conventional wisdom. And you are succeeding. By the way, aren't you thirsty for a tasty craft beer?
I've enjoyed an incredible four days in the Dominican Republic, learning a great deal about new media in this quickly developing economy.
In this blog post, I provide some ideas for government, politics and industry and some thoughts for the future based on my discussions with dozens of people.
After my speech, I had the honor of meeting Dr. Leonel Fernandez, President of the Dominican Republic, for a private executive dinner in the Presidential Palace. I was impressed by the knowledge President Fernandez had of social media and his eagerness to adopt new tools.
But first some background.
In this video, I ask Frederic Emam-Zade, Director General of FUNGLODE, about the intersection of new media and government. FUNGLODE was founded President Fernandez during a period between terms as President. Direct link to YouTube here.
Here are some of the things going through my mind as I reflect on my visit:
For President Fernandez
I would like to see you establish a weekly or bi-weekly video address that you distribute through YouTube and other social media channels. The video address can be casual (you do not need extensive preparation) and should be short (between 4 and 8 minutes).
I would also suggest that the subject of each address be partly chosen by the public through a submission process. You could use a social media tool such as Twitter to announce the new videos and receive suggestions for future topics.
For the government of the Dominican Republic One word: Infrastructure. A vital task will be bringing Internet access to the entire country. It would seem that wireless should be a priority, but I would like to see a goal for having the country networked at some date in the future.
Governments have always been about infrastructure. A hundred years ago roads, railways, and ports were a high priority. Fifty years ago it was airports. Now internet and wireless connectivity should be a high priority.
No less important for the government is to foster transparency and accessibility of government leaders via the Web. In a country that has gone through periods of corruption in the past, the current leaders need to be as open and honest as possible, and the Web is a great way to accomplish this.
For the media
Newspaper, television, radio, and magazine journalism has potential to be much more interactive and real-time with the adoption of Web content delivery and social media. Members of the public now have direct access to journalists and can comment on anything they say in the media.
For example, I had a conversation with Alexei Tellerias, who writes for the daily newspaper Listin Diario. Alexei is the model of a journalist who makes extensive use of social media. After our interview, we connected via Twitter and I checked out his popular blog Catarsis Diaria (although I do not read Spanish).
For tourism and industry to reach your international audience One word: Segmentation. There are some good sites in the English language promoting tourism. However, most are generic and focused on everything the country has to offer. You need to create micro-sites that appeal to different buyer personas.
For example, I love to surf. When I chose a beach location I want it to be near great waves. The Dominican Republic has some epic surf spots, but it is difficult to find appropriate information in English. A quick Google search for Caribbean surfing delivers information leading to Puerto Rico and Barbados as the top hits.
While I love to surf, my friend Larry is a scuba diver so he is another buyer persona. Another friend travels with small children and needs kid friendly resorts. Eco-tourism is popular now. And couples in Japan frequently get married in resort locations. Each of these buyer personas should have a separate site leading them to the wonders of the Dominican Republic as a tourist destination.
For everyone
Your greatest national resource is young people. Tap into the knowledge and social media savvy of smart people like Raul Delgado. Understand the international success of people made popular through social media like singing sensation Cristal Marie. Hire the services of social media experts such as Juan Carlos Pena, a Santo Domingo Web 2.0 advocate who runs a boutique ad agency.
What happens when you enter your name into Google? Do you come up number one? If not, are you on the first page? And if you do appear, is it something valuable? Or is the listing a photo of you as attending your ten-year high school graduation party (or worse)?
You need to be found on Google. Personal branding is essential in today's world.
1) If you're looking for a job, potential employers will search your name.
2) If you're a lawyer, consultant, or real estate broker, your clients will search your name.
3) If you're a salesperson, your potential customers will search your name.
4) If you're single, potential significant others will search your name.
There are several strategies to make the first page.
If you have a unique name, congratulations, you will be found. If you don't, and your name is something shared by many people like "David Scott," you could use your middle name professionally like I do. When you make yourself unique, you own the results for your name.
You can blog prolifically and post other valuable information on the Web like my friend Chris Brogan and rise in the search results.
Google now shows Google profile results at the bottom of U.S. name-query search pages. These results offer abbreviated information from user-created Google profiles and a link to the full profiles. Read more about it on the Google blog.
Even if you already appear in the search results for your name, you should have a Google profile and keep it up to date.
Stop what you’re doing and create or update your Google profile now.
Alert readers of this blog and my books will recall that I discuss the Grateful Dead as an example of an organization with great marketing. I'm a fan, having listened to the music since the first live show I went to as a teenager in 1979. I've managed to slip a Grateful Dead reference into each of my five books and usually manage a mention in my speeches.
Counter-culture marketing
The band is a big case study in contrarian marketing. Each of the band's many marketing innovations seems to be based on doing the opposite of what other bands (and record labels) are doing at the time. I really like how the band has cultivated their fan base and I think all organizations can learn from what they do.
Starting in the 1960s, the Grateful Dead encouraged concertgoers to record their live shows, establishing "taper sections" where fans' equipment could be set up for the best sound quality. When nearly every other band said "no" the Grateful Dead created a huge network of people who traded tapes in pre-Internet days. More than 4,000 shows from the band’s 44-year history have been taped.
The band was happy to have Deadheads trade tapes and make copies for friends. The cult of the Grateful Dead concert became a pre-Internet World Wide Rave, driving millions of fans to the band's live shows for over thirty years and generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.
Of course, photography is also encouraged. Take a look at the tickets for other concerts and you’ll see "no cameras or recording equipment" printed on most of them.
The band in 2009
I watched with great interest when the Dead announced a 22-show tour, hitting the road for the first time in five years. (The band dropped the Grateful part of the name when Jerry Garcia died in 1995). What would they do this time?
Of course, I wanted to see the band. So I used the Grateful Dead's own ticketing as I have for nearly 20 years. When most other bands were happy to rely on promoters and the early electronic ticketing services like Ticketron (and later the oline Ticketmaster), the Grateful Dead sold the best seats directly to fans through their own ticketing service.
I got three tickets for the show in Worcester, MA (near my home in Boston) for Saturday night's show so my wife and teenage daughter could attend their first shows. With the band's ticketing service, we sat in the ninth row (I snapped this photo). At the show, I ran into my friends HubSpot CEO Brian Halligan and Overdrive CEO Harry Gold. (Brian and Harry, what is it about the Dead and marketing company CEOs?) I also went to last night’s show, but two nights in a row was too much for my family.
Free club gigs
But I'm getting ahead of myself. In late March, I was in New York City to open the NASDAQ Stock Market with GlobeNewswire when I got an email from the Dead ticketing office asking if I wanted to go to a free Dead show at the Roseland Ballroom in New York that night. Yes, please! The band handed out free tickets to the club gig (and two others the same day) for fans as a way to build buzz for the tour. And of course, I tweeted it. Free stuff sells product.
For the best quality, buy from the band
Even though the band encourages fans to photograph and record the music and trade with others, they record and sell themselves to guarantee fans the best quality.
You can get recordings of any of the tour's shows by buying from the official Dead site as a download or purchasing a CD at the show itself which is available just 15 minutes after the end of the show. The guy next to me said he buys the CD because he wants to re-listen to the show on his three-hour drive back to Vermont. I buy the band’s recordings too, because I appreciate the high quality and professional mixing.
Because each show is different, fans enjoy having dozens or even hundreds of show recordings. In the 2009 concerts, the band has drawn from some 150 songs they had rehearsed in the months leading to the tour. In fact, through the seventh show (that I saw at Worcester), they had yet to repeat a song in concert.
A new innovation on this tour is a partnership with Blurb to offer an official tour book for each show. At each stop on the tour, a collectible book featuring the photography of longtime Grateful Dead photographer Jay Blakesberg is available.
A few days after the show, you go to Blurb.com and place an order. The book will include photos from the show that you attended. You can choose softcover or hardcover and even upload your own cover image. I love it. Even though I snapped my own photos, I'll buy the book because it was my daughter's first show. I'll have a photo of my family taken at the show as the cover of my personal copy of the book.
I find the custom tour book innovative. Instead of producing one book for the entire tour (as most other bands do), the Dead allows fans to create their own custom book.
New fans
Even though many Dead fans are in our 40s like me, having found the band in the 1970s (or original fans from the 1960s who are in their 50s and 60s now), many younger fans are at the live shows. My daughter ran into to people from her High School at the show and learned of several others who went (via Facebook of course). After the show, she posted her own photos onto Facebook and will wear her concert T-shirt when she goes back to school on Monday.
What I learned from the Grateful Dead
1. I learned that even though most of the content in my last several books is available for free on this blog or as one of my free ebooks, people will still pay for premium packaging in the form of my print books.
2. I learned that the more people who know about me, the more live gigs I am asked to do.
3. I learned that it is critical to rehearse for live performances.
4. I learned that an audience wants to feel special and customization of each live performance is essential.
5. And I learned that your most passionate fans are also the best people to tell your stories and spread your ideas. Treat them with care and respect.
Early today I had an opportunity to visit the Wellington headquarters of the New Zealand Rugby Union (NZRU), at the invitation of David Barton-Ginger who serves as the online manager. The New Zealand Rugby Union is the governing body of rugby in New Zealand, administering all parts of the game in NZ from grass roots, Air New Zealand Cup, Rebel Sport Super 14 and the All Blacks (the national team).
David has a challenge and he would like your help.
While he has gotten started with social media (see below for details), David is in the middle of a process to convince the managers of NZRU to "lose control" and jump feet first into the swirling waters of social media.
His goals are to inform existing fans from around the world and to bring new fans to the All Blacks who may purchase shirts, caps and other items and may buy tickets to attend games.
David has a big meeting coming up in a few days and he needs to know, from you, why a sports team with fans all over the world should pay close attention to social media.
What in particular should David be doing? Please leave a comment here if you can help.
All Blacks and social media
During the season when the All Blacks are playing, the site gets more than a half million unique visitors per month. Interestingly, 80% of web visitors are from overseas.
David knows that he needs to use social media to reach fans. Several weeks ago he started a Twitter feed @NZRU and an All Blacks Facebook page and he also has a YouTube channel. These are all new initiatives.
David also administers The Direct Line on the All Blacks site. Each month NZRU selects five questions submitted by fans and put them to NZRU CEO Steve Tew to answer via video (which David films). For example, in a recent video Tew gives a brief explanation why players tend to not swap their jerseys on the field after a game anymore.
David has been with the team for five years. Like many people who gravitate to building content-rich Web sites and experimenting with social media, he came to his work by accident. "I was a foreign exchange trader with Westpac and then went to live in London for a few years and worked in banking there too. But I was looking for something more creative. I came back to New Zealand and on a whim attended a Web design course. I really enjoyed it so I started doing some Web project management in the banking industry."
Then the opportunity with the New Zealand Rugby Union came up and David grabbed it. "It was a three-month temporary assignment, but I'm still here after five years," he says.
David says while he is a big All Blacks fan, he tries to put his role first and look at things from a web perspective. He thinks that if he were much more passionate about the team, it would sometimes be more difficult to do his job.
OK, David here’s my idea.
I really think you need to play up the Haka more on the site and in social media. I suggest you consider creating a microsite with photos and video of the All Blacks and the Haka. For many new rugby fans, the Haka is the first thing that separates the All Blacks from other teams.
FYI, in case you don't know, the Haka is a traditional war dance of the Maori, the indigenous people of New Zealand. New Zealand's national rugby team, the All Blacks, perform a Haka war chant prior to each match. In the rugby world, the All Blacks performing the Haka is definitely a World Wide Rave. I've seen this at the Hong Kong Rugby Sevens and can confirm that it intimidates the other teams.
Petr built the entire design himself without the use of any commercial blogging software. Maybe that's why I was so drawn to it. Because it is an original deign, it doesn't look the same as a TypePad blog (like mine) or a Wordpress or Blogger blog. It does not have that template feel.
At South-by-Southwest a few weeks ago I hung out for a while in the blogger lounge.
I noticed that quite a few people who own Apple notebooks have personalized them with stickers like Francine, Jason, and Gary. I've got a bunch of stickers on mine too.
And I also noticed that of the few people using PCs, none had not personalized them.
Interesting, don’t you think?
Do people love your products so much that they personalize them?
The United States Air Force Public Affairs Agency, Emerging Technology Division just released a new ebook and video about how social media is used in the Air Force. The ebook and video contain excellent information for all organizations and should serve as a blueprint for social media guidelines for those who do not have them.
For those of you who work in large organizations struggling with social media, please share this with your bosses.
Both the ebook and the video show how Airmen are using social media to stay informed and inform others. Airmen have the ability to communicate and tell the Air Force story better than anyone else. By reaching out with social media tools, they're able to it quickly and in their own voice.
Boston, MA - April 8, 2009 - David Meerman Scott is pleased to announce a partnership with Dow Jones and HubSpot to leverage and focus on innovative solutions for new and improved, next generation, cost effective, world class, high performance, value added outcomes.
Does the sentence above suck or what??
That's how so many PR people write — using gobbledygook-laden phrases that are so overused to have become meaningless.
I have just completed an analysis of all 711,123 press releases distributed by North American companies in 2008 through Business Wire, Marketwire, GlobeNewswire, and PR Newswire. The project looked at 325 gobbledygook phrases from a variety of sources, with the detailed analysis on the number of uses for each phrase done using Dow Jones Insight.
So how do you avoid using gobbledygook?
Easy! Write using the words and phrases your buyers use. You can also run your press releases, web site text, brochure copy, resume or any other document through the brand new Gobbledygook Grader from HubSpot. The Gobbledygook Grader (released today) will give you a score based on how many over-used gobbledygook phrases you use and suggest ways to improve.
Here are the top 25 gobbledygook phrases used in press releases sent in North America 2008.
Gobbledygook terms were drawn from these sources:
- Informal survey of my journalist friends in order to create The Gobbledygook Manifesto, first published in 2007.
- This Paperclip is a Solution: A survey of general business and trade publication editors in September, 2006 by Dave Schmidt, VP, Public Relations Services at Smith-Winchester, Inc.
- Learn more about Dow Jones Insight, which I used for this analysis.
Disclosures: I am on the board of advisors of HubSpot and I provide coaching services to Dow Jones Enterprise Media Group.
