Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

Yesterday a story ran in the New York Times about popular retailer Target actively ignoring bloggers as part of their PR strategy.

The saga began when a blogger from ShapingYouth.org contacted Target about a questionably-designed ad showing a woman splayed across a large Target ‘bull’s eye’ pattern. Target’s PR team responded by saying, “Target does not participate with nontraditional media outlets.”

The PR person really should have shown the blogger the same courtesy any Target “guest” would have received if they had contacted the company about an ad they found offensive. Instead Target put up a barricade, got considerable blogger backlash, and is now featured in the New York Times for their new media faux pas.

The lesson is twofold. First, treat bloggers the same way you’d treat customers or journalists. Second, it’s common for news from the blogosphere to bubble up into the mainstream press, good or bad.

Thanks to ATIS547 for the photo.

Lots of marketing types are talking about Clive Thompson’s provocative article in Fast Company, postulating that the Influentials theory of Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point (and many others) is, well, bollocks. I don’t have anything smart to contribute at the moment, but I wanted to point to two clever marketers.

Seth Godin discriminates between ‘important’ and ‘passionate’:

Unleashing the Ideavirus didn’t spread because ‘important’ people endorsed and promoted it. It spread because passionate people did.

One more reason not to obsess about the A list in any media category. Worry instead about people with passion and people with lots of friends. You need both for ideas to spread. That was Malcolm’s point all along.

Meanwhile, publishing industry guru Monique Trottier references a pitch I made to her, and the results:

In internet land, my blog post is a very small blip in the Brother Printer landscape. Although SoMisguided is the first result for the search “brother printer wireless”. But down on Earth, everyone who comes into our office comments on our fancy printer and I mention it’s a Brother Printer and that I like it very much. It does an excellent print job. I also comment that I wish it did more…

So was it a waste of money for Brother Printers to hire Darren and to get a bunch of bloggers test driving their printers? I don’t think so. Again, it comes down to trusted sources and timely feedback on something people were interested in.

It is worth mentioning that Duncan Watts, the smart dude between the anti-influencers theory, isn’t stirring the pot without reason. As Thompson writes:

He has developed a new technique for propagating ads virally, which can double or even quadruple the reach of an ordinary online campaign by harnessing the pass-around power of everyday people–and ignoring Influentials altogether.

Ironically, the influencers are talking about his approach.

So this isn’t quite social media marketing, but I just saw (and loved) the movie Juno and thought this was a clever outreach strategy.

In the film, the protagonist Juno talks to her friend on a phone shaped like a hamburger. It’s a charming illustration of her quirky character, and there’s even a joke about it in the script.

The producers of Juno apparently sent a hamburger phone to journalists to entice them to review the film:

It looks like you can get your own on eBay. Photo courtesy of KPBS.

Garth Risk Hallberg recently published his first novella, A Field Guide to the North American Family. Subsequently, he received his first Amazon review, from Grady Harp, a top ten Amazon reviewer. He started exploring the upper echelons of Amazon reviewers, and discovered some interesting stuff:

My own research suggests that GH is no more or less credible than Amazon’s other “celebrity reviewers.” Harriet Klausner, No. 1 since the inception of the ranking system in 2000, has averaged 45 book reviews per week over the last five years—a pace that seems hard to credit, even from a professed speed-reader. Reviewer No. 3, Donald Mitchell, ceaselessly promotes “the 400 Year Project,” which his profile identifies only as “a pro bono, noncommercial project to help the world make improvements at 20 times the normal rate.” John “Gunny” Matlock, ranked No. 6 this spring, took a holiday from Amazon, according to Vick Mickunas of the Dayton Daily News, after allegations that 27 different writers had helped generate his reviews.

Elsewhere in the piece, Garth seems a little surprised that his publicist solicited Harp’s review, and that the Amazon reviewers may be actively gaming their own (and their friends’) rankings. Garth may be feigning his surprise for the sake of the article. Such behaviour shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody who’s participated in any sort of social network with abstract popularity valuations. People will struggle to accrue the most karma points, cred or (as is the case on Amazon) ‘helpful votes’. These currencies also help marketers like us identify and target the influencers in a community.

This reminded me of a point we make in the book about identifying niche communities to engage:

Most important to the marketer, there are many websites that only cover a particular industry or category. It may be more valuable to identify the niche social news website in your industry and focus your efforts there. If you run a winery, then 1,000 oeniphiles from Cork’d or OpenBottles are probably more valuable than 15,000 users from Digg.

Amazon reviewers hardly constitute a niche, but I’m sure there are top reviewers for very specific book categories. So if you’ve got a book on terriers, for example, don’t necessarily pitch the top reviewers. Pitch the top reviewers of pet books instead.

UPDATE: Matthew’s discussion of the furor over recent Digg algorithm changes highlights how hotly contested such topics can be.

Over the past year and a half, we’ve done a lot of marketing projects for DeSmogBlog. We feature a few in the book. One which we didn’t write up was The 100 Year Letter Project. From the introductory blurb:

We asked friends of DeSmogBlog to write a letter to their great, great grandchildren about their vision and hopes for their world in 100 years, in the context of global warming. Will we all be underwater? In outer space?

To kick off the project, we contacted some prominent bloggers, climate scientists and writers. We got about a half-dozen letters from these ‘experts’, and those letters became the backbone of the project. That drew some attention, and we since have received a bunch more letters.

Beginning with experts does a few things for you:

• It gives a nascent project instant credibility.
• It may drive traffic if those experts are active elsewhere online and link to the project.
• It can attract mainstream media attention.

The reason I’m writing about The 100 Year Letter Project now is because it was referenced in two different spots–a blog and an article–by The New York Times. That’s terrific, but frankly not necessarily reflective of the project’s relatively low visibility.

In my experience, the media loves big, easy-to-articulate ideas. My odd pop art web projects like Get A First Life and Dear Rockers have received a surprising amount of media attention for this reason. They tell a good story, and make for good sound bytes. The same is true, I think, of the 100 Year Letter Project. Of course, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without the letters.

I’m a bit late on this, but I wanted to post a quick pointer to Chris Winfield’s 10 simple steps to social media success in 2008:

#4 - Meet a Digger a Day. Spend 15 minutes per day (during the week) contacting a new person from Digg via instant message and forging a bond. You can usually locate this information right on their profile page and add them to your IM program. This simple task will do more for your chances of success at Digg than anything else you can ever do.

As we write in the book, social media success is more about time than money. Chris describes how much time each activity will take, though his estimates are a little dubious. If you’re only taking three minutes to answer each question on Yahoo Answers, how valuable are your answers really going to be?

In any case, there are a number of good tips in the article–check it out.

In the book, we only dedicate a couple of pages to micro-blogging, and specifically Twitter. That’s because it’s a new service, only hip among geeks, and, well, we had a lot to cover. Here’s a bit of what we said:

As of November 2007, Twitter and its competitors are just beginning to see mainstream adoption. Frankly, it’s too early to say how commonplace these services will become in marketing efforts. Unless you’re marketing to geeks—or your customers ask for it—we’d recommend caution in expending too many resources on micro-blogging.

We discuss a couple of media-related case studies as well. I may have to change our tune in three to six months, but much like Second Life, I don’t think there’s enough value in spending time on Twitter for the average, non-technology marketer. It’s just a little early in the adoption curve to spend serious time on micro-blogging. If you’ve got the resources, great, but I think you’re going to probably enjoy better return on your invested time elsewhere.

Regardless, Vanessa Fox (who we quote in the book on another topic) has written up a lengthy, insightful post (and associated podcast) covering all the basics. I’ve already bookmarked this as a reference when we expand the micro-blogging section in version 2.0. Here’s part of Vanessa’s answer to a question about how brands can use Twitter:

If nothing else, you can use it to track conversations about you. Natala, for instance, mentioned that she often Twitters about Alaska Airlines, as she flies a lot (I have no idea what that’s like; heh). Alaska could track mentions of them to see what people are saying - if they’re having good or bad experiences and how discussions about those experiences are impacting brand perception.

On a personal note, I have very mixed feelings about Twitter. I’ve found that it’s kind of an Ego Distillery. Blog posts, obviously, tend to be pretty self-centered. But because Twitter is restricted to 140-characters per post, it really seems to bring out the self-importance in everyone.

Twitter asks the question “what are you doing?” I find that the answer is too often “something really important”.

That’s why I only post quotations from songs and poems in my own Twitter account. It ensures that I don’t add to my already burgeoning self-centered online presence, and my Twitter followers probably enjoy a break from the banalities of their friends and colleagues lives.

Blogger and cartoon pundit Hugh McLeod (that’s some of his excellent work) wrote a list explaining his take on “the new marketing” or “marketing 2.0″. The post is full of wisdom, but there’s one item that definitely resonated with me:

The most important asset in The New Marketing is “having something worth talking about”. This makes certain marketing people squeamish. A lot of us grew up in an era of flashy commercials for rather uninspiring products, and something in our DNA makes us believe that’s the proper way to go about things.

Early in the book, we’ve got quite a long section on this very topic. It’s an exceptionally common problem. The fact is that most marketers don’t have a Purple Cow of a product–they just have a plain, old Holstein. And it’s usually not their fault (except, you know, they chose that company to work for or launch).

We address this in the context of manufacturing memes that can help make ordinary products worth talking about:

So, that’s the truth. Sometimes it hurts. But before you put down this book, leave marketing for good and become a moose breeder, read on. Even if you don’t have a remarkable product, and you can’t help someone else build something wonderful, don’t despair. Dry those crying eyes and make a meme.

Hey, as it turns out, this section of the book is one of our sample chapters (PDF). You can read it for free, if you’re so inclined.

It’d be super-cool to get one of Hugh’s cartoons into version 2.0 of the book. I’ve added that to the list of edits, and will ask him about it in the new year.

I’m about a month late on this, but I wanted to comment on this curious move by cookie-makers Pepperidge Farm to launch ArtoftheCookie.com, a website dedicated to their cookies and, uh, maintaining connections among women. From the New York Times article on the campaign’s launch, a Pepperidge Farm VP comments on the site’s goals:

During those conversations, “this notion of connection came up again and again,” he added, and how “hectic lifestyles, life in general, has gotten in the way” of women forging and strengthening ties with friends — over, say, a pot of tea and a plate of cookies.

Elsewhere, he remarks that the company is moving “to two-way marketing from one-way marketing”.

At first I thought they’d actually launched a social network. That would’ve been a dumb move, but it’d be more exciting than what they’ve got here. They give ridiculous lip service to “connecting” and “two-way marketing” and yet the only way to interact with their website is to “join the email list”. Er, 2001 called, and it wants its web marketing campaign back.

Here’s are a couple more examples of just how one-way the site actually is: there’s no associated Facebook campaign, and there are remarkably few outgoing links on the site (their stay-connected page features seven web-based strategies for keeping in touch, but doesn’t link to a single external resource).

I’m guessing their ‘ethnographic research’ indicated that their customers, in fact, just like to eat their cookies, and that the whole ‘connection’ thing was devised by an overly-zealous marketing squad with delusions of grandeur. Everybody can pat each other on the back around the board room table, but why would actual normal human customers visit this website?

I’m a little disappointed in the Times, too, for writing such an uncritical piece about the campaign. Writer Stuart Elliot might have located an Pepperidge Farm customer (or even a user of the site) with whom to talk.

Of course we couldn’t launch a social media marketing book without making a page for it on Facebook. Incidentally, we’ve got a decent chunk of content on Facebook in the book.

If you’re not already, you might consider becoming a fan of Getting to First Base: A Social Media Marketing Playbook on Facebook. Hope to see you there.