Mike Moran, Paula Berg and Viral Marketing

I’m getting another dose of Mike Moran. Now he’s talking about different types of viral marketing:

Content-Based social media marketing. Focuses on the content to be posted and passed around (e.g. Blogger, WordPress.com,YouTube, del.icio.us,digg, StumbleUpon). Does your organization have content that might be passed along?

If you think YouTube isn’t for B2B, you’re wrong. YouTube lets potential IBM customers get a product demonstration in a low-stress environment. No pressure. Very cost effective. Here’s an example from IBM:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63qIq9t9Gqs]

Squidoo is another example. Some might find it helpful.

Don’t launch big new projects. For example, don’t say you now want all of your releases to be social media press releases. Try one. Then try another in a different way.

Personality-based social media marketing. For example, LinkedIn, Facebook, MySpace. It’s a way for people to find consultants directly.

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Mike Moran Keynote


Our luncheon speaker is Mike Moran from IBM, author of Do it Wrong Quickly: How the Web Changes the Old Marketing Rules.

Mike opened with the great point that what we need to have the freedom to dip our toes into Social Media, and sip from a glass instead of drinking from the fire hose like Robert Scoble. We need to experiment and try things, becoming expert in what works for our employers and clients. Realize that most of what you do will fail, but that’s OK. Fail faster.

Now you can target even the smallest group. You can measure the results of everything you do. But the flip side is that you must change your message in response to what your customers Say (comments, blogs, product ratings) and Do (search, purchases, page views.)

It’s just as important to pay attention as it is to get attention.

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Facebook and LinkedIn in Media Relations

This morning I have the pleasure of presenting at the Bulldog Reporter Media Relations Summit 2008 in San Francisco. My co-presenters are Chuck Hester from iContact and Valerie Jennings from Jennings PR. Chuck will be focusing on LinkedIn (here’s his profile, and mine), while I will do the Facebook portion (please feel free to “friend me.”) Valerie will wrap it all up.

If Chuck and Valerie want to upload their presentation to Slideshare.net (a site you should check out), I will be happy to embed here. Meanwhile, here’s mine:


I’m including below links to some of the web sites I will reference in the presentation, so you can see the actual sites (vs. the screen shots in Slideshare) and relive the magic.

I will revise and extend, but here’s the basic presentation. Here are some of my earlier writings that outline some of the potential I see for media relations through Facebook.

Putting the “Relations” in Media Relations

“Cheers” for Medical News

Toward a Medical News Community

I believe that with the long-awaited granular privacy settings Facebook has implemented, this will become much more practical. People will use Facebook increasingly for business when they are able to more effectively segregate what information is available to their professional contacts and what is more personal. I’ll be writing more about that soon.

Scoble Media Relations 2008 Keynote

I’m blogging from the front row of Bulldog Reporter’s Media Relations 2008 Summit, as Robert Scoble begins his keynote. I like how Robert starts his presentations by gauging the experience of the audience, so he can speak at a level that will be meaningful to them.

Robert says Web 3.0 is “the death of the page.” An example is Twittervision. He’s giving the group (more than half of whom haven’t been in Twitter) a tour of his life. Most of them haven’t seen FriendFeed either. Robert is on 20 different services in what he calls “the social media starfish” and Friendfeed brings them together. Here is his FriendFeed and here is mine.

Robert is using Sliderocket for his presentation, which is an online version of Powerpoint. It allows collaborative editing. It’s like a wiki for presentations.

Scoble uses Google Reader for reading his RSS feeds to create “a river of news.” Techmeme tells him the big stories. The thing that just changed in Google Reader a few months ago is the addition of friends, which lets people share news.

He talked about “the friend divide” which means that people who are new to a service aren’t going to get as much value out of it because they don’t have a lot of friends yet. The solution: Get friends.

Upcoming.org is another site for seeing what is…you guessed it…upcoming.

Robert closed with a demonstration of Qik, which live streams video from his cell phone. It’s a TV station in your pocket. The minute he turns off his cell phone it becomes a recorded archive on the Qik site. It only works with Nokia phones right now, I think.

Robert’s take-away: The word-of-mouth network is hyper-efficient. Even in the 1980s when he worked at a camera store, 80 percent of his sales came from word-of-mouth. With the web today, it’s a world-wide network for word-of-mouth. That’s what I’ll be talking about at my presentation.

Go to the Bulldog Media Relations group to see more of the pictures from Robert’s presentation.

Blogger Relations

Jon Greer is moderating this session. He is Jon (at) jongreer (dot) com.

Craig Newmark is the founder of Craigslist. He says most of his role is customer service. He has a sense of mission, speaking up on behalf of the lobbyist industry and PR, who are just trying to get a fair shake for their clients. His personal blog is cnewmark.com. He says he is a libertarian moderate, not a socialist, despite those who think that his site has undermined for-profit media. In response to a question about people fraudulently posting ads that lead to houses being looted, he says they’re not very smart, because IP addresses can be traced.

Tom Foremski writes Silicon Valley Watcher, reporting on the business of technology and media. He mainly considers himself a reporter. He did an experiment, “Pitch me only through Facebook” and recently discontinued it mainly because Facebook’s email management isn’t good. Basically he recommends that people should connect by following on Twitter. He was the person who basically kicked off the social media release with this post. Don’t call and ask: “What have you been writing about?” Tom says: “I don’t have time to read my latest posts to you.” Exclusives or access to a CEO are interesting to him. He doesn’t want to just add to the white noise by writing what everyone else is doing.

Carolyn Pritchard is from GigaOm. (They are on wordpress.com, too.) She is the editor for six blogs. They are all niche sites, and PR people should be pitching to those sites individually instead of her. Following the conversation is key; sometimes knowing what people have said in the comments on recent posts would help engage. The principles of media relations hold for blogger relations, too. Do your homework.

Tom says media professionals will be increasingly moving into blogging where they will do journalism, but with a different cost structure. They are now “always on” and don’t have the high cost structure of massive skyscrapers. When he left the Financial Times, he decided he didn’t want to be on the sharp pointy end of the disruption.

Tom thinks a social media release is a better way of distributing information because it’s more modular. Fundamentally, though, all he was asking for was more links in press releases, and tag things, and organize the information better. Check out socialmediarelease.org. Businesswire says there is no additional charge for this, but getting the buy-in from PR people is limited.

Another great session. I had read Tom’s blog (it’s even part of my presentation tomorrow), and everyone knows Craig. It was great to get to see and hear them in person.