Web Ink Now

Google News now offers real time breaking coverage pages

Today when I checked out the Google News headlines as I do several times a day, I noticed a new feature.

Now, for each breaking story covered, there is a button called See realtime coverage. Clicking the button brings you to the latest news.

This is a cool development. As I've said for several years now the most significant development on the Web is the rise of real-time.

Social media are tools. Real-Time is a mindset.

As I write this, a breaking business story this morning is about Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson and the inaccurate educational information found in his biography. Clicking over to the real-time coverage of this story shows what the latest mainstream media journalists and bloggers are saying. (Note that if you are reading this much after the breaking stories in early May 2012, you may not see any real-time news so I include screen shots in this post.)

If you're clever and you understand how journalists scramble to file breaking news stories quickly, you can insert your ideas into the mix.

I call this technique Newsjacking.

Think about this story for a moment. Who might newsjack it?

• An expert in executive recruitment could blog their take on finding a new CEO.


• An ethics professor could do a YouTube video with thoughts for CEOs about honesty.


• An employment law expert could create a discussion document on the legal ramifications of this situation.


• A securities analyst could give the stock price ramifications via an instant PDF report.

What ideas do you have? Get it out there now because now is the time. Journalists are looking for additional angles on this story right now.

The new Google News real-time feature is ideal for Newsjacking. Do what I do and check out Google News a few times a day to see what’s going down and consider how you can add to that discussion.

GolinHarris shows how an agency does real-time communications right

For the past several years, I've written and spoken extensively about the idea of real-time marketing & PR, the subject of my Wall Street Journal bestseller, now published in eight languages.

The biggest challenge of implementing real-time is one of mindset. It is tough for marketing and PR people who operate in the typical long-term planning of "campaigns" to adapt to instant engagement. This seems to be especially true of agencies that have built a business around implementing campaigns for their clients.

GolinHarris shows how an agency does real-time communications right

I was intrigued with the GolinHarris real-time approach of what they call "The Bridge" - a network of real-time storytelling centers - staffed in the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific.

This Wall Street trading room approach is exactly what I've constantly talked about and I’m excited to see it being implemented so I connected with Jim Dowd, Executive Director, National Media for GolinHarris, to learn more.

"We use The Bridge as a listening outpost but we are doing it a little differently because we have the mainstream media folks and the digital folks working side by side," Dowd says. "So we are not just looking at social media which is obviously the flavor of the day. Digital and mainstream are literally sitting next to each other and they are coming up with ideas and are pitching media together and that is where we have seen just terrific traction."

For example, on the day that Michelle Obama announced a new food pyramid called MyPlate, the GolinHarris team watched the press conference live on CNN looking for ways to get their clients into the emerging memes. "We are watching all the activity online and took an idea to Hartz to create a food pyramid for dogs," Dowd says. The client loved the idea and reacted quickly. The team generated some attention as a result.

Generating quick client approvals

With most clients working at a glacially slow pace, requiring lengthy legal and PR client-side reviews, I wondered how GolinHarris is able to get speedy signoffs on ideas generated from The Bridge.

"Yeah, approval is always tricky particularly with legal departments," he says. GolinHarris works with clients to develop topics ahead of time in anticipation of potential stories so that they can work quickly. "With clients like McDonalds we have general topics that we predict, like if something comes up about the Happy Meal. McDonalds have preapproved that we can have certain conversations about Happy Meals with language we can go out with."

Just like a 24-hour Wall Street bond trading desk

The Bridge is set up just like a 24 hour Wall Street trading desk with three regions – Asia, Europe, and North America - passing the work around the globe.

"We are truly doing it globally," Dowd says, "We are 24/7 so we will scour the landscape the first few hours of the day here in New York then we will pass all of our results and insights onto Chicago and Chicago to LA. And you know, the whole notion of offices and cubes may go away. It's exciting to be able to walk in The Bridge and literally see what is going on."

Newsjacking the Super Bowl

When you have a real-time mindset and the tools of a facility like The Bridge, then Newsjacking becomes second nature.

"Our client AutoTrader.com challenged us to make them the leader in all of the post- Super Bowl auto commercial coverage," Dowd says. AutoTrader.com did not advertise during the Super Bowl but wanted to generate a bunch of attention anyway - a classic newsjacking strategy.

AutoTrader's analysts worked with GolinHarris to create data on consumers' real-time search patterns during the Super Bowl. They used data from the AutoTrader.com site and correlated that to the times auto commercials aired looking for lift (how much of a boost in search activity each vehicle got in the hour after its ad appeared). They provided the resulting data to the media who used it in stories like Acura NSX Won Big with Super Bowl Spot, Survey Says which appeared on the Wall Street Journal site.

Overcoming fear

"There are lot of clients who love the notion of the bridge and real time marketing and what we are doing but aren’t jumping on it out of fear - fear of the unknown, fear of the new," Dowd says. "A lot of our clients are still quite old school and traditional."

There's nothing like success to break down the fear barrier.

Dowd cites Dow Chemical as a noteworthy GolinHarris real-time success. The company is very careful with stories related to such topics as chemistry or chemical engineering or stem research but that doesn't mean they can't engage in real-time.

"We were in The Bridge tracking that President Obama was going to give the Teacher of the Year Award and we were watching live on CNN," he says. "And it was a chemistry teacher who won that award so we immediately got approval from Dow Chemical to go ahead and offer up public congratulations to the teacher and that resulted in some nice coverage. Even with the trickier clients there are always topics that will work."

Images courtesy of GolinHarris

My keynote at the 2012 NAMM show now freely available

I delivered a keynote presentation at The NAMM Show on January 20, 2012 in Anaheim, CA. The NAMM Show is one of the largest music product trade shows in the world, founded in 1901

My interactive presentation to 1,287 audience members (people were scanned as they entered so we know exactly how many were there) was titled Real-Time Marketing & PR and was based on my bestselling book of the same title. I show how to instantly engage your Market, connect with customers, and create products that grow your business now.

Direct link to the speech on Vimeo.

Here's the NAMM post about my speech.

It is an honor to be able to work such an awesome stage with such an enthusiastic audience! I appreciate the gift I am given every time I am asked to speak.

Make it free

Several things important things come to mind about this video: 1) I am releasing it freely on the Web and 2) NAMM is offering it freely on their site. So many speakers want to control their content and not allow people to see the video. "I’m a paid speaker," many speakers say. "Why should I give away my speech?"

Conference organizers are reluctant to give away content for fear that people won't buy a ticket for next year’s event if they can count on the content being available.

Content drives action.

Get your valuable content out there where people will find it in search engines and will share it via their networks.

Content Arbitrage

When I worked my first job on a Wall Street bond trading desk, I was fascinated by financial arbitrage, one of the ways that traders made money.

This technique involves taking advantage of a temporary price difference in two or more markets and is usually executed by simultaneously buying and selling the same security. A pure arbitrage involves nearly zero risk.

For a simple example, imagine the price of gold is at $1,600 an ounce in London and at the exact same time it is $1,620 in New York. A trader could simultaneously sell in New York and buy in London to lock in a $20 profit. (This simple illustration ignores risks and transaction costs).

Content Arbitrage

I've used what I sometimes call "content arbitrage" for years. Adapting the definition from the financial markets, content arbitrage involves finding information in one place and revealing it in another to take advantage of temporary differences in the knowledge level of people in those two markets.

We've all experienced content arbitrage in action. You're at your desk when somebody walks in and says: "Did you hear...?" and proceeds to tell you about the competitors' new product, or the CEOs resignation, or an earthquake, or a some other important information. One person learned the news and told another.

Content Arbitrage and Real-Time Marketing

But when it involves publishing that content as a form of marketing then content arbitrage gets really interesting. Here are some examples:

You're quietly checking out Google News while at a conference and some breaking news about your industry crosses the wires. You immediately grab the URL to a story and post it on Twitter using the conference hash tag. You "buy" the content on Google News while everyone else is paying attention to the speaker and then "sell" it by tweeting it to those who do not yet know about that news. The benefit for you is that you're seen as knowing things quickly and you'll get noticed (and re-tweeted).It's great for your personal brand.

Or you're watching television and an industry expert says something remarkable or controversial. If you blog about it right away, you're the first to share with the wider marketplace who had not been watching.

Content arbitrage, by definition, exploits temporary differences in knowledge levels. So you've got to be really fast when you jump in. Soon everyone will know the big news and if you wait too long to blog or tweet you look silly if people already know.

It's all about real-time. The more you dilly-dally the more the market for that information becomes stable again (when everybody knows the news already).

Straying into someone else's market

Content arbitrage also occurs when people stray into each other's territory on purpose to exploit simultaneous differences in information markets.

How about this: Ask kids what's hot in school and why. Listen carefully to what bands, movies, social networks, and other things are all the rage. You may have information that you can exploit in another market.

Or this: Watch for news releases from government agencies. You can sometimes spot an important development in your market that people aren't yet aware of. If you're first to blog it or explain what it means on a short video, you can effectively newsjack that release and have your industry's media quoting what you said in your blog or video. Not to mention the positive exposure you get to your existing and potential customers.

Content Arbitrage in the Financial Markets

Bringing this idea back to the financial markets, smart traders use content arbitrage to read beyond the financial newswires on their workstations, looking for emerging trends within publications read by the general public.

By the time news appears on the wires it's already too late. They might read Seventeen Magazine to learn about a hip fashion craze or Shape for the diet trend of the month. Even more interesting are those who lurk in chat rooms and read blogs for the nuggets of information that haven't yet hit mainstream publications. If you were the first to buy beef futures because you spotted an emerging low-carb diet trend before the financial wires wrote about it, you cashed in big time. Any time one information market (say the financial newswires) says one thing about a topic and the blogs and chat rooms reveal something completely different someone can profit. Cool—people actually get paid to do this.

But there's a catch. With all forms of arbitrage, the potential to profit only exists as long as there's an exploitable difference between simultaneous markets. It is a real-time idea.

Any great examples of content arbitrage for content marketing purposes out there?

Trader Image: Jefferies & Company
Network Image: Shutterstock / improvize

Go Mobile

In Tokyo's Roppongi entertainment district you find several hundred bars within walking distance of the subway station. Yet only a few are visible from the main street; the vast majority are tucked away on the upper floors of back-street buildings. To differentiate, many cater to highly refined customer preferences. So if you want to listen to classic reggae while sipping a Red Stripe, there is a bar for you in Roppongi. But how do you find these establishments when you’re thirsty and confused in an unfamiliar city?

Your mobile of course!

Because buyers use their mobiles to search for products and services in the time of need (like I do when I'm in some faraway city), you've got an opportunity to reach them when they are ready to buy.

The elapsed time from firing up a mobile app like Foursquare or Google Mobile to a customer walking in the door is now measured in minutes (or even seconds).

Adding GPS (global positioning system) capability to mobiles has transformed a once mundane voice-only mobile phone into a targeted weapon focused on proximate surroundings. With onboard GPS capability, the mobile user gains awareness of nearby people, companies, and locations, even in unfamiliar territory like the bar district of Tokyo. Engaging people via mobile devices is a fast-growing and fascinating area that every modern marketer needs to be knowledgeable about.

That's why an understanding of mobile marketing is so important.

Fortunately, Go Mobile has the answers. The new book, part of my own New Rules of Social Media Book Series, is published today.

When I created the series with John Wiley & Sons, I said that it was essential to have a book about mobile marketing. Fortunately, Jeanne Hopkins, V.P. of Marketing at HubSpot and Jamie Turner, founder of the 60 Second Marketer agreed to write this book. Either one of them would have written a great book on mobile marketing, but having them collaborate is double the fun. I learned a great deal by reading this book and I’m confident that you will too.

Mobile marketing is for all organizations

The challenge is to understand this new landscape so you can get your business into the mix at that precise moment of decision.

It's not just consumer brands that need to pay attention to mobile marketing. There's also the often overlooked but essential requirement that you make your website mobile friendly which is essential to all. Many sites still don't have a mobile-friendly architecture, so those organizations miss out on opportunities to sell to the many people now accessing their sites from wireless devices.

Mobile offers the power to reach buyers at the exact time and place they're looking for what you offer. It is a revolutionary tool for building business and it's easy to learn.

Go Mobile provides a step-by-step roadmap for people interested in using mobile marketing to grow their sales and revenues. The book covers how to set-up a mobile website, how to run a QR code campaign, how to develop a mobile app and how to run a mobile banner ad campaign, and more.

USA QR-code Scavenger Hunt

To launch Go Mobile, Jamie & Jeanne have hidden 4 iPads with copies of Go Mobile in secret locations around the U.S. Clues will be available each day starting January 12, 2012. Scan the bar code to begin playing or go to the Go Mobile site to learn more.

Fun fact: There are 6.8 billion people on planet Earth. 4.0 billion of them own a mobile phone, but only 3.5 billion of them own a toothbrush.

Are you reaching this vast marketplace?

Disclosure: I am on the board of advisors of HubSpot.

real time + marketing = revolution

This week, the new paperback edition of Real-Time Marketing & PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect with Customers, and Create Products that Grow Your Business Now is out.

The book was originally published in November 2010 in hardcover, and this edition is revised and updated with new stats and new examples.

As I was writing the first edition, I felt like a lone voice in the wilderness. Every time I searched the web for talk about issues relating to real-time marketing and PR, results were scarce. Pundits and practitioners seemed locked into thinking about long-term campaigns and not how to seize advantage from what’s happening right now.

More than a year later, search engines tell a very different story: "real time + marketing" is a topic that has exploded. Even the Direct Marketing Association is in the game. The DMA annual conference, one of the largest gatherings of marketing professionals in the world, is now billed as "The Global Event for Real-Time Marketers."

What happened?

Although my humble book did climb to number two on the Wall Street Journal best-seller list ("and stayed there for a week or two," as Jerry Garcia once said), I can't claim paternity here. The wave was coming, like it or not. I just happened to spot it early.

A Real-Time Revolution

When I first sat down to write, protestors in Tehran had just figured out how to use social media as a weapon of civil disobedience. Less than a year later, the same real-time techniques were toppling despotic regimes such as those in Egypt and Tunisia.

Even among CEOs 80 floors above the street, the realization has begun to seep up from below: "What happened to Mubarak is not unrelated to my business." The revolution now underway is not just political and it’s not just an "Arab thing." Upheavals are coming. Those who understand and adapt stand to be among the winners. Those who ignore what's happening may not fare so well.

The real-time revolution is very much a "people thing." And the people I interviewed for the book are its heart and soul: passionate characters at the forefront, from Amsterdam to Boston to Tokyo, each with an eye-opening story to tell. They made researching and writing such a compelling experience for me that I hope... even those who'd choose a root canal over a marketing book will not be disappointed if they decide to read Real-Time Marketing & PR.

By definition, this is a subject that changes quickly. So if you read the first edition you will find many new examples and anecdotes added.

I worked with my publisher John Wiley & Sons to make the look and feel of the new paperback edition of Real-Time Marketing & PR similar to the new third edition paperback edition of The New Rules of Marketing & PR. Similar cover, same fonts, consistent use of terms and language. In a sense, Real-Time is a continuation of New Rules.

If you've read New Rules and not yet read Real-Time, this might be the time.

Social Media ROI Hypocrisy

New research - published here for the first time - proves that executives who demand that Social Media ROI be calculated are hypocrites.

HYPOCRISY

It's ridiculous that executives require marketers to calculate ROI (Return on Investment) on one form of real-time communications: Social media like Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube. Yet they happily pay for other real-time communications devices for employees like Blackberrys, iPhones, and iPads without a proven ROI.

Often, the first question I am asked at my talks is about ROI. So I turn the question back to the audience as you will see in this very short video shot on location at recent gigs in Amsterdam, Bahrain, Baltimore, Barcelona, Boston, Buffalo, Cleveland, Istanbul, Miami, Rotterdam, Stockholm, and Washington DC.

Direct link to Social Media ROI Hypocrisy on YouTube.

My recommendation to you when faced with executives who demand that you prove social media ROI is to point out the hypocrisy by asking them to show you the ROI of their Blackberry.

I conceived of this video and shot the location scenes myself at my gigs. The final video was produced and edited by my friends at Rewatchable.

Please share. Especially with those in your company who demand that ROI calculation.

Newsjacking!

Today my newest book is released.

Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage

The traditional PR model -- sticking closely to a preset script and campaign timeline -- no longer works the way it used to. Public discourse now moves so fast and so dynamically that all it takes is a single afternoon to blast the wheels off someone's laboriously crafted narrative.

Enter newsjacking: the process by which you inject your ideas or angles into breaking news, in real-time, in order to generate media coverage for yourself or your business.

A new kind of business book

I wrote Newsjacking to take advantage of the many features of the ebook format used by Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, Apple's iPad, and the Barnes & Noble Nook. Here's the book on Amazon. and here it is for iPad. For example, with the interactivity to Web content built into these readers, when I talk about a blog post in the book, I link directly to the blog post.

Newsjacking is in full color and contains infographics to illustrate the important points.

While Newsjacking is ebook only, it is from Wiley, my long-time publishers. Newsjacking will not be printed on dead trees. It is a short and punchy book (you can read the entire thing in about an hour) and is priced right. Read more about my ideas (and the many excellent comments from others) on the transformation of books.

You can get your copy of Newsjacking and begin reading right now via Amazon Kindle, Apple iBook (for iPad and iPhone), an Android edition, and Scribd. It is coming very soon for Barnes & Noble Nook and Sony ereader.

Anybody can Newsjack.

As journalists scramble to cover breaking news, the basic facts -- who/what/when/where -- are often fairly easy to find, either on a corporate website or in competing media outlets' copy.

The challenge for reporters is to get the "why" and the implications of the event.

Why is the company closing its plant? The corporate website may offer some bogus excuse like "because it wants to spend more time with its family." Competitors may quote some expert's speculation on the real reason, but a reporter can't cite that without adding something self-demeaning like "according to an expert quoted in the New York Times."

When a story is breaking, journalists need original content—and fast.

Enter newsjacking.

If you are clever enough to react to breaking news very quickly, providing credible second-paragraph content in a blog post, tweet, or media alert that features the keyword of the moment, you may be rewarded with a bonanza of media attention.

Newsjacking creates a level playing field —- literally anyone can newsjack —- but, that new level favors players who are observant, quick to react, and skilled at communicating. It's a powerful tool that can be used to throw an opponent or simply draft off the news momentum to further your own ends.

I stuffed Newsjacking with tons of examples: Rick Perry, Larry Flynt, Oakley, and the London Fire Brigade to name a few.

There's an action plan for how you can newsjack and own the second paragraph of the news story that everyone in your market is watching.

Newsjacking is both a new PR technique and a new kind of business book.

I'm interested in your thoughts.

Fishy QR codes and deep sea transparency

This past weekend, the Boston Globe ran a fantastic series of investigative articles on the fish business. It turns out that DNA testing organized by the Globe revealed nearly half of 183 fish samples collected at restaurants and supermarkets in the Boston area were not the species ordered.

As a fish lover and frequent restaurant patron, this is certainly stinky!

Fish misidentification is especially common at sushi restaurants the Globe found, partly because they use various names for the same fish. Testing showed that 32 area restaurants that serve sushi sold misnamed fish.

But there is hope in the form of QR codes!

A company called Trace and Trust, a network of fishermen, distributors, processors and restaurants, has organized a system that uses QR codes to track individual fish from the ocean to your plate.

What a fantastic use of QR codes in marketing!

Trace and Trust tells customers exactly who caught their seafood, as well as when, where, and how it got caught. The community believes this level of transparency results in the highest quality and freshest possible seafood you have ever seen.

The system delivers complete transparancy and is fun too.

Do you know who caught your seafood?

Here is a sample of a QR Code.

If you were sitting at a restaurant, enjoying a meal, you'd be able to scan the code and learn that Chris Brown landed your Summer Flounder on 10/20/2011 while fishing near Block Island. Captain Chris Brown’s vessel, the F/V Proud Mary, is docked in the harbor in Point Judith, Rhode Island. Wild Rhody shipped 45 pounds of this catch to Tastings Wine Bar and Bistro and 606 Congress.

There's even a photo of Chris with the fish that you're about to take a nice bite out of. How lovely.

What a fantastic example of real-time marketing at work!

Here are ten more examples of QR codes for real time marketing

The Power of Real-Time Marketing Takes Focus at DMA2011

Last month I delivered a presentation at the DMA annual conference. The theme of the entire #DMA2011 was "The Global Event for Real-Time Marketers" so it was fitting that I talked about the ideas in my book Real-Time Marketing & PR.

I give the DMA a great deal of credit for recognizing the real-time revolution early and adapting the organization to the new world of instant communication we live in today. I'm happy to see that next year's #DMA2012 is also focused on real-time marketing.

Fortunately my talk was filmed and you can see it here.

Direct link to the video on YouTube.

My talk was sponsored by SAS as part of the company's efforts to educate people about the importance of real-time customer analytics. In the video, you'll see Hillary Ashton from SAS introducing me.

The video was filmed and edited by the talented pros at Rewatchable. I've seen many videos of talks that are filmed from one camera angle or are otherwise predictable. Once you see this, I think you’ll agree with me that the way this is filmed and edited makes it far more interesting than the typical speaker video.

Thank you to the DMA, SAS, and Rewatchable for making this video available.