What has struck though me is how many people are already claiming to be Google+ experts. It has been up for what – three weeks? From what I can tell, it is still a work in progress. It appears Google is still tweaking the features. So how can anybody claim to be an expert in something so new?

Frankly, I am always skeptical of anyone who calls themselves a social media expert. I have noticed that the people who are really good at it – Brian Solis, Seth Godin, and Sara Evans to name a few– never call themselves experts. Heck, for that matter I have never heard or read where Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, LinkedIn’s Reid Hoffman, or Twitter’s Biz Stone call themselves social media experts. Ditto for Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who created the most dominant search engine ever. And of course, it is their company that created Google+.

If the people who created some of social media’s essential tools, and the people who use those tools most often don’t claim to be experts, how can someone out there in Cyberland claim to be? In fact, most of the people who occupy the social media space are still trying to figure Google+ out.

“Robert Scoble invited 1,000 of his friends during the weekend so he’d have enough mass to figure it out,” Gini Dietrich, chief executive officer at Arment Dietrich, Inc.  in Chicago blogged a couple of weeks ago. “Jay Baer thinks there are business applications (I don’t agree…yet). Chris Brogan has 10 reasons he thinks it will be a Facebook and Twitter killer. Jason Falls thinks it is a Facebook competitor and some of his readers hope he’s right just to see something different and/or better.”

I should note that Dietrich is as big a skeptic as I am about Google+. In a July 18^th blog, she wrote: “As of this writing, it has been 24 days since Google+ launched. That is not enough time to figure out a) if it has business applications, b) how it truly works for networking, and c) what it’s value is going to be. For heaven’s sakes. If it goes the way of Buzz and Wave, you’ll have wasted your money. (paying someone for training.)

“Not to mention, it’s still in beta and doesn’t open up to the world until the end of this month. It will be at least a year of use before we figure out its idiosyncrasies.

“But there are still people out there claiming to have all the secrets because they claim to have introduced Twitter to the business world so surely they understand how Google+ is going to affect your daily life. Add to that, they’ve spent 250 hours inside the tool, learning and using.”

Dietrich did the math. She figured out that someone who spent the last three weeks “learning” Google+ spent 11 hours a day doing that. Who has that kind of time to learn one application?

These so-called experts illustrate a major problem with social media. To put it briefly – the used car salespeople have moved into the space. You know the type – the loud pushy ones who claims to be an expert in something. They are not, they are just in it for the quick buck.

Unfortunately, a lot of people are going to fall for their pitch and waste their money on a “training” course that gets them nothing but makes them a little poorer. Those eager ones want to be on the cutting edge, even if all that happens is they end up bleeding.

As Ken Kesey said in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s nest: “The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he’s getting it.”

I have previously written about selling social media to a company, but that’s only the first step. There is more to be done after completing the initial sale than there was before the sale.

We who do social media full-time forget what a culture change it is for most organizations. Not just for those people in the C-Suite, but for everyone down to, and including, the receptionist. Remember, up until to about six years ago, most employees didn’t have to worry about social media or marketing their company in any way.

“Too often, people from company “A” will recognize great success that company “B” is having by doing XYZ with social media,” Blogger Adam Christensen wrote. “So, logically, they decide to do the same at company A. But the results are dramatically different. Why? Because they didn’t account for the corporate culture variable which is inevitably different between the two companies.”

Christensen is currently the director of social and digital communications and marketing at Juniper Networks in San Francisco. Until April, he worked for IBM in communications and marketing where he led IBM’s social business strategy and execution globally. He worked on projects including IBM’s Watson and Smarter Planet.

So first, what is corporate culture and how’s it formed?

Well, corporate culture is essentially an internal brand. It doesn’t exist until the majority of people at the company buy into it. The company’s leadership and employees who have the same values and assumptions about their place of work create it. Although it can awhile for a company to form a culture, once formed it can be difficult to change.

Why? Because it provides a sense of belonging and safety to the people who work there. Remember, in every company there are the written and the unwritten rules. The unwritten rules are that which forms the culture. By following both sets, especially the unwritten one, an employee can generally minimize surprises and things out of the ordinary.

The problem is that same culture can keep a company from taking the calculated risks they need to stay viable. Consider the bookseller Borders or the video rental company Blockbuster. While I don’t know the ins and outs of what happened to each, I know from being a customer of each that their cultures were wedded to a way of doing business that was clearly no longer viable.

Those examples are not going to stop other companies from making the same mistakes. Staying in one place is usually the normal human state.

So along comes someone like myself telling the leaders and employees they need to adopt social media if they want to remain in business. Yes, they know about Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and the other social media sites. They might even say they want to do it. But it still means a huge culture change.

So what do you do? Well, first it takes an intensive education program. You need to show everyone how social media works and what it can do for the company. You need to show each employee how they fit into the plan.

You also need to get their input. You need to find out what they are comfortable with and what they are willing to start with. As I always say, you have to crawl before you can walk.

Once you and the leadership feels that employees are ready to dip into social media, start out internally. Set up internal blogs, an employee Wiki and other applications. Let as many employees as possible play, learn, grow, build relationships, and develop the needed collective awareness. Once the employees are comfortable with it, take it public. It will work then.

The sites are supposed to help people keep track of their friends and what they are doing. For businesses, the idea is that if you or I see a number of our friends going to eat at a particular restaurant or watching the same movie, we will be inspired to do the same. That is supposed to increase the business’ sales.

It doesn’t appear to me that people are using those sites as their creators’ intended. Two things seem to be happening.

The first is that people are not just sharing a new restaurant or a good movie. No, they are listing everywhere they go and everything they do. Some of the things I have been notified about are that people are going for run, stopping to buy gas, grocery shopping, going to their office, and a myriad of other things. I can literally track some people through their entire day.

The only thing I haven’t yet seen – and I assume this will happen sooner or later – is someone will notify the world they have stopped to use the restroom.

The second thing that seems to be happening is many users seem to be dropping out of the services after they use them for a time. I suspect that people out on a Saturday night just forget to notify everyone where they are and what they are doing. I have noticed that some people used to notify of every step they took (my apologies to Sting) seem to have disappeared.

What is happening to these sites illustrates one of the pitfalls of social media. Some people seem not to have any kind of brake on their postings. They tell the world everything they are doing. I am not a psychiatrist so I cannot give you a professional analysis of why they do that.

However, it does seem to me to be a trifle narcissistic to constantly announce what you are doing and where you are doing it. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I really don’t care if you are at the gas station.

This is causing what I believe is another detrimental effect. I get so many notifications from people that they clog up my inbox. I tend to delete them because of that. I just don’t have time to go through all of them.

That means that if by chance someone does go to restaurant or movie in which I am interested, I am not likely to see it. That’s not good if you own a business. It means your message is getting buried.

Yes, I know that social media marketing calls for businesses to cede control of their brand to consumers. However, if I were a business owner, I would not cede my brand to a bunch of people who spend their time clogging up others’ in-boxes. That would seem to be counterproductive.

That’s just one more reason social media marketing has to be carefully targeted toward and audience and a goal. It should be used as a scalpel, not a meat ax.

Besides, isn’t it just a bunch of tweens, teens and 20-somethings who use those sites? I often hear from executives that my daughter and her friends use Facebook all of the time. My son seems to be constantly playing games online with his friends. Does anyone seriously think I can sell my industrial widgets to that demographic?

After they say that, they are going to lean back into their chair. You had better be able to make that sales pitch.

The first thing you should do is explain pull marketing. In brief, Pull marketing is not about pulling consumers in; it’s about giving consumers a reason to opt into a company. Consumers are in control; they decide where they go and what they experience.

Pull marketing means that companies go to clients, join their communities, give them reasons to voluntarily draw the company into their personal media experiences. They’re opting into the companies, not the other way around. Companies are being forced to give up some control over their brands.

That’s a hard concept of many companies to swallow. For decades, marketers have had it their way. This idea of giving up control makes the leadership nervous. Remember, most leaders are numbers people – accountants, engineers, and the like. They think they can control all the variables that go into selling their product.

Frankly, that’s nonsense. Marketing is an unpredictable thing. Anyone who says differently is naïve, lying, or has their head stuck in the sand. The best that can be hoped for is to reduce the chances of something going wrong.

Social media provides a better chance of that.

Why? Because normally the whole marketing campaign is created at an agency where six 20-something creatives couple their work with a 30-something senior account director, who in turn reports to a 40-something vice-president, who then takes the concept to the client’s 50-something chief marketing officer, who approves it. Throw in a focus group or two, and maybe two dozen people have signed off on the idea. It is then fired like an artillery shell into the general public with the idea that it will hit its target. The hope is the “explosion” will be big enough to sell the product.

Consumers these days, in general, are smart enough to get out of the way. That’s why more and more traditional campaigns fail.

So what needs to be done is to show the company’s leaders the facts on traditional campaign failures. The numbers are out there. I see no reason to repeat them here.

As I said, most CEOs are numbers people. They want everything the company invests time and money in to be quantifiable. That can also be done with social media. Again the numbers are there. I would suggest going to Hubspot – the Cambridge, Mass.-based social media wizards. They have all the facts and figures you need.

Be prepared to gently push back. There will be skeptics. A lot of old line-marketing people feel threatened by social media. As I said, to them it something “those kids” use. Well, I am older than most of the marketers and I think social media is the way to go.

Remember, social media is here to stay. Be gentle, be patient, but be firm when selling it.

Let me tell you where I stand – I am very reluctant to connect with someone who does not include a picture. I am active on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Friendfeed, YouTube, Plaxo and a number of other sites. You will find my mug on every site that asks for it. My feeling is the more information one provides, the better.

Although I have not read every comment in the photo debate – who has the time – those taking the time to write something seem to be split 50-50 on the question. What amazes me is that people are writing fairly long posts on the issue. Of course, like most of these discussions, it wanders off course and ends up being filled with invective.

As an aside, I am continually amazed how people are willing to say things on the ‘Net that they would never say to a person’s face. Someone needs to write an “Emily Post” for the web.

Getting back to my main point, providing as much information about yourself and company is extremely important. Let me count the ways:

• A company that would like to do business is going to do its homework. That means they are going to gather as much information as possible about your business. Make it easy for them. It is human nature to favor the easiest path. If you make them search too much, they are going to look at some other company.
• The same goes for those of you looking for a job. The last statistic I saw showed that 85 percent of human resources people go to LinkedIn first. Besides making it easier, the more information you provide, the better. When things are missing, those make hiring tend to get suspicious.
  • A note about running pictures for those job seekers who, like me, are aging. I have heard the argument that we have a better chance with hiring managers if they don’t see our picture. So what are you going to do when you go to the interview? From your resume alone they are going to figure out how old you are. To me, it is a form of lying not to include a picture.
• The more information provided, the higher your company’s search ranking. That is, of course, if you provide the information with SEO in mind. Of course, you want that higher ranking so more people can find your business.

Now I know many people argue that won’t provide some information because of the fear of identity theft. Well, unfortunately, an identity thief doesn’t need your online profile. There is so much information floating around out there about all of us that it is impossible to keep much things secret anymore.

Of course, no one should post such things as their birthday. That’s just common sense. But one of the things you give up when you go on the Web is a lot of your privacy. It is just world we live in.

So lean into it and post that picture and all the other information. It is going to help much more than it will hurt.

Facebook has more users, YouTube has more viewers, Twitter updates more often but LinkedIn is where the people and companies you want to reach reside. As I tell clients, LinkedIn is the adult Facebook.

“ … what businesspeople appreciate and respect about LinkedIn is that is has significant processes and controls that keep it from becoming like Facebook,” writes LinkedIn expert Wayne Breitbarth in his book The Power Formula for LinkedIn Success. Kick-start Your Business, Brand and Job Search.

I highly recommend Breitbarth’s book. I have over 13,000 followers on LinkedIn. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the site. After reading the book, I realized that I knew just enough to be dangerous. Thanks to Breitbarth’s book, I am a much more savvy LinkedIn user.

So the first question is why used LinkedIn? I will let Breitbarth explain. He explains it through what he calls the Power Formula: “Your Unique Experience + Your Unique Relationships + The Tool (in this case, LinkedIn) = The Power.

What he means is that combining LinkedIn with your existing relationships and experiences will give you a decided advantage over your competitors. By using LinkedIn you can develop and refine your brand by a creating strong LinkedIn profile and expanding your network of contacts. Doing those things will help you accomplish your goals for yourself and your company.

LinkedIn is the place to show your experience and your expertise. It is the place where those you respect can state that in an endorsement. It is where you can connect with potential clients and employees. It is pretty much the Swiss army knife of social media sites.

Now there are many ways to use LinkedIn. But use it you must. You cannot simply sign up for it and expect the masses to find you.

The first you have to do is set up as complete a profile as possible. Breitbarth calls the top part where you list your name, title, business and location the “30-second bumper sticker.” The information listed there travels around LinkedIn with you as you post information, join groups, and comment on other’s activities. As Breitbarth points out this is the more important section of LinkedIn. He has found that many people will look no further than that box. Let me add that when I search for somebody, that’s the first thing that comes up on Google.

I also, and Breitbarth agrees, strongly advocate putting a professional looking photo there. To me not including a photo means you are hiding something. I know the argument that many of my fellow boomers make – that people are going to know how old they are if they post that picture. Well you know what, they are going to find anyway. If someone contacts you through LinkedIn for a job interview, what are going to do – have plastic surgery to make yourself look 26-years-old? So just deal with it.

After that, the key to profile to your profile is being as detailed as possible. The last study I read found that 85 percent of human resources people to go LinkedIn first when looking for a job candidate. You want to give them as many reasons as possible to pick you.

The next key is endorsements. This shows what others think of your work. People have been kind enough to endorse my work. It shows potential clients or customers that you are someone with whom they should do business.

Now, I have a firm rule on endorsements. I will not endorse anyone who I have not worked with. It is simply dishonest. How can one provide an objective analysis of work you have never seen. Likewise, I will not ask for endorsement from someone I don’t know.

Now, I have been lucky in that most of my endorsements are unsolicited. I think those are those are the most objective. On the other hand, I can understand asking for them from people who know your work well. I have also done that.

One more thing – LinkedIn groups. I highly recommend joining as many as LinkedIn will allow. That is currently 50. Those are the place to meet like-minded people, share information, get questions answered, and again demonstrate your expertise.

I don’t think there is any social media site that is as complete at LinkedIn. In fact, if you are going to join only one site, make it LinkedIn.

Granted, it would be better if those residents of the C-Suite had a guide who knew how to lead them throw the social media jungle. Obviously I think social media is the best marketing tool to come along since traveling medicine shows. Both relied on word-of-mouth to sell their products. One was and one is highly effective.

While those executives should do a better job of searching, I also fault we social media marketers. We are part of the problem. We need to make a better case for what we do. We need to show the skeptical executives that the social media sphere is the best place to be. These are people who are used to “fire and forget” marketing. In their world they tell their marketing people to hire an agency and produce a campaign. The only time an executive sees the campaign is in the final approval process. You have to show them how social media is replacing all of that.

What those executives want is a demonstrated method that is going to drive sales and profits. They want to know what the return-on-investment for the money, time and effort they are going to have to put into social media. They don’t feel any need to tell their friends where they are eating or whether they are leading in some kind of faux friend race.

So what do you do to convince them there they should be parking some of their marketing dollars in social media?

First, let me tell you what I don’t do first. I never show anyone Facebook as a marketing tool in the first meeting. To the average 50ish executive, Facebook is where their children post pictures of their dogs and friends. Plus, they have had their personal people tell them a seemingly good job candidate was rejected because of those pictures from that fraternity party. At best they see no need for Facebook, at worst they see it has a huge waste of time. As I once had an executive tell me: “there is a reason why I do not want to connect with people I knew in high school.”

What I do show them are the facts and figures showing how effective certain kinds of social meeting marketing can be. I also show them examples of companies such as Ford, Zappos, and others that used social media to expand their footprint in their marketplace.

When it comes to specific sites, I usually start off talking about what Linkedin can do for their company. Why Linkedin? Well in the business world it is viewed as the adult Facebook. Most likely the executives you are talking to have a Linkedin profile. They understand how it works and its effectiveness. They know their company has found good candidates for open positions.

In short, they understand how effective Linkedin can be when used properly. It is an easier sell. Not easy, but easier.

The second thing I talk about is blogging. It is a little tougher to sell than Linkedin. Executives usually balk at first when I tell a blog is not a sales document. But when I show how potential clients are drawn to the company’s website by a well-written blog that demonstrates the company’s expertise, the light bulb usually goes on.

From there I move onto YouTube. Watching a video campaign – such as “Will It Blend” shows the effectiveness of using sites such as YouTube. After that comes Twitter, which I describe as a billboard for their company. It is a term they understand.

I also make it clear that it usually takes six months to a year to see the results of a social media campaign. By then, having seen the results of successful campaigns, they get it and are willing to make the investment.

What I just gave you was view from 35,000 feet of my process. Trust me works, but only if you are careful to separate the substantive from the nonsense.

The key to marketing is twofold: to build word of mouth about your company and to increase your Google rankings. A blog is the best way to do both.

People who read and like your blog will tell others about it. They will retweet it, post it on Facebook, and generally spread the word. This builds credibility for your company. It builds Google rankings because the more people who read your blog, the higher Google will rank your company.

Look at the chart below from Cambridge, Mass. – based HubSpot. Note that companies that blog receive an average of 55 percent more visitors to their websites. But I am not going to bore you with a lot of data. Instead, I am going to tell how I do it.

Now granted I was a reporter from 26 years. I am used to writing on deadline. I know the rules of grammar. But as anyone who is a consistent reader knows I am not perfect. I strive for it, but I rarely reach it. You don’t have to be a great writer to be a blogger.

So here are my keys to blogging:

• First, lets talk about what a blog is not. It is not a sales tool. You try to sell something through a blog and you will have no readers. The social media sphere hates blatant attempts to sell.
• What a blog is a way to demonstrate yours or your company’s expertise in a particular area. It is also a way for current and potential clients and customers to connect with your company. It is a place for them to comment, compliment, debate, and criticize. It is a place for you to respond to all of that.
• Choose an overall theme. This blog focuses on social media, marketing and public relations. My readers know they come to PR 101 to read about those topics. This is important. Every successful blog I have read focuses on a particular area. Readers want to know what to expect when they come to the blog.
• Coming up with things to write about – this is often the toughest thing. It is what usually stops people from doing a blog. Here’s what I did before I started this blog more than two years ago: I wrote out a list of 24 things I felt I knew enough about to sound semi-intelligent about. That kept me going for about four months. Now I do research and follow what’s going on so I always have topics. I also try to have a couple of “evergreen” blogs in the hopper in case I am not able to write a new blog that week.
• A note about length – I read some blogging guides that say your piece should be no longer than 250 or 400 or 500 words. Balderdash. Some of my most read pieces have been over 1,000 words. Write something interesting and compelling and the readers will come.
• Be consistent when you publish. If you decide to post a new blog every Monday, do it. Readers want to know when they can expect to see a new post. Incidentally, I used to post on Mondays and Wednesdays. I moving that to Tuesday and Thursdays because of my work schedule.
• Do your research on the topic you are writing about. Yes a blog is part opinion. But back that opinion up with quotes and citations from your sources. When you do quote someone, link to the site from which the quote came, unless you actually interview them. If you interview them, make that clear. I do both. I think it provides a nice mix.
• It takes time to build a readership – usually at least six months. So be patient and don’t give up.
• To build that readership, you need to post links to your blog on as many sites as possible. I post on Twitter, Digg, Facebook, Delicious, Stumbleon, Friendfeed, Google Reader and Linkedin. I also have a dedicated group of readers who have requested I send them the link via email. In addition, I use Google Friend Connect, which is on my blog site. Those people also get the blog as soon as it is published.
• Which brings up another issue – make sure on your blog has share buttons so your readers can spread the word. I will always be grateful to those people who share my blog with their followers.

I think that advice should get you started. If you have any other questions, please feel free to ask.

Among that last sheaf of messages is a group that is really starting to bother me. It has gotten to the point that I have been flagging them as spam and blocking the senders.

Who are these annoying senders? Are they insurance salesmen, Nigerian widows offering me millions, or schemes telling me how I can make millions while working only 20 minutes a day? Nope, not one from one of those groups.

Where that email is originating is from so-called social media “experts.”

These are people who you would think would know better. After all, they claim to be social media experts. But apparently in their effort to learn about social media, no one explained push vs. pull marketing to them.

In brief, social media’s foundation is pull marketing. What that means is a company provides evidence that it is an expert at what it does or how it makes quality products. It does not send that information out itself. Rather satisfied clients spread the word around the Internet. That builds positive word-of-mouth, which in turn builds engagement and eventually sales.

What that means is one notice sent out. If it is worth reading, or attending, people will. It is more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.

What is not done is acting like a used car salesman and bombarding a potential customer with a dozen or more sales messages.

That’s exactly how I feel when I receive one of these emails telling everything they can do. I don’t care. When I help on something, I go looking for it.

One English-based trainer has sent me seven emails in the last two weeks touting her social media training systems. If an email can be described as breathless, these would fit that description. The subject line on one read: “complete social media course – last remaining places!”

Another group I joined (now that was a mistake) keeps urging me to post on Craigslist. I get one of those about once a week. I tried it once – it didn’t go well.

Then there is my personal favorite. I keep getting emails from people asking me to endorse them. If I do that for them, they tell me they will reciprocate and endorse me. Now mind you, I don’t even know these people, let alone worked with them.

I have a very firm rule about endorsements. I will only do it if I actually know you and worked with you. What value is an endorsement from someone who knows nothing about you? I also never ask for endorsements. If somebody likes my work, they can feel free to endorse me. But that’s up to them.

I am currently taking a sales training course from Westboro, Mass.-based Kurlan & Associates Inc. One of the first lessons we were taught is that people hate sales calls. When you connect with a potential customer start off just saying your name. Then discuss how you can help them. Don’t go on and list all the things you can do. At that point, they don’t care.

So when I get an email or a call from so-called “social media expert,” I immediately know they are not. The step is to hang up or hit the delete button.

Here’s the first thing that we all should remember – social media doesn’t kill careers, people using social media kill careers. Oh and you can add companies into that also. Social media can also wound them pretty severely.

You must be a monk living in a Nepalese cave if you don’t know what Wiener did. According to ABC News Weiner admitted Monday he had “engaged in ‘several inappropriate’ electronic relationships with six women over three years, and that he publicly lied about a photo of himself sent over Twitter to a college student in Seattle over a week ago.”

The overall lesson in all of this is think before you do anything on the Internet. I am not sure why it is, but many people do not consider the consequences of their actions when posting on the web. I mean does anyone think a sitting US Representative would post a picture of his junk on his office wall? Of course not. Yet when people get on the Internet, they seem to think that the same rules don’t apply. They don’t ask that question I always urge clients to ask before doing anything – “what if … ?”

I don’t get it. Research indicates the average post initially reaches approximately 150 people. If each of those 150 people sends out the same post and it reaches another 150 people each, over 22,000 people will see it and so on. You see how fast something goes viral.

So why do Weiner and others do inappropriate things on the web? I think it is because they don’t understand the power of the Internet. A lot of people don’t get it. They think they are somehow anonymous when they post. Well, they aren’t.

Here’s the second lesson to be learned from this: “three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead.” That is one of my favorite Ben Franklin quotes. I use it when I discuss crisis communications.

Weiner has been touted as one of the more Social Media savvy members of Congress. Yeah, and I am scheduled to perform brain surgery tomorrow. Did he honestly think that those pictures would stay private?

It is hard to believe that anyone doesn’t know that once you enter the Social Media realm, privacy is surrendered. Anything you put on the Internet is accessible to anyone who wants to see it. If it is something salacious or embarrassing that pretty much guarantees it will go viral. We humans seem to revel in spreading that around. We really like it when it happens to someone who we feel thinks they are smarter than us.

There is the third lesson to come out of this. This is one is about crisis communications. In today’s Internet-based world, you have about an hour or so to respond to a crisis. You cannot wait more than that to formulate a response to whatever happens. In fact, if you decide to do something stupid like tweet pictures of your body parts to college student females, you had better have your story all set to go before you tweet.

Seriously, companies today have about an hour today to put out the fire. That’s why I always urge clients to have a crisis communications plan in place. They need to be monitoring Social Media 24 hours a day, seven days a week to catch those small fires. Wait any longer than that and it’s too late.

If Weiner had come out right away and said, “yes, it’s me. It was a stupid thing to do and I am sorry I did it” the story would have flared and died. Instead, he waited way too long to respond.

As my father used to say: “there is no sense in being stupid unless you show people how stupid you are.” We Coles are sarcastic people. What the Internet has done is expand the opportunities to demonstrate that stupidity.

It is only the foundation though. Just building that webpage is like building the foundation of a house. Would you stop building your house after the footings were poured, the basement walls were built, and the basement floor was laid?

I can remember when I was a child going to visit one of the men who worked for my father. The guy was building his own house. The only thing he had completed when we went there was the basement. He had put the first floor on, but at that time it was the roof. He and his family were living in that basement.

The place kind of looked like a bunker actually. The concrete block walls were sticking up about two feet above ground level. The first floor/ceiling was covered with black tar paper. It sat in the middle of a wooded lot on a dirt road out in the country. It was kind of hard to see unless you were almost on top of it. It wasn’t easy to find.

That’s what happens when you build only a webpage, but don’t add anything else.  You have a structure you can live in, but it’s very basic. It is kind of like that foundation at the end of the dirt round. Unless someone knows specifically what they are looking for, they are not likely to find it – SEO or not.

So what should be done next?

A successful social media campaign only happens if inbound marketing techniques are used. It is inbound marketing that drives the effort. That SEO-enabled website is only the first step. Inbound marketing is building links to your website so it moves up the search rankings.

One of the most important parts of a social media campaign is ensuring that the website in question comes up on the first page of a Google search. Preferably it should come up within the first five results. Many searchers will not scroll down to see more results.

Before I go any further, I should note I build client marketing around Google, not Bing. I keep reading that Bing is going to give Google a run for its money, but I have yet to see any evidence of that. According the monthly comScore qSearch analysis of the U.S. search marketplace, Google held 65.3 percent of the search market in April. It has held about two-thirds of the search market for a long time.

“More than 16.2 billion explicit core searches were conducted in April,” comScore reported. “Google Sites ranked first with 10.7 billion searches, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 2.6 billion, Microsoft Sites with 2.3 billion, Ask Network with 491 million and AOL, Inc. with 248 million.”

I always go with the leader.

That being said, how do you seduce Google into ranking your website on that first page? Well, you build links to that website – i.e. inbound marketing.

How are those links built? By spreading your message around the web. That is done by blogging, especially blogging. Several studies by Boston-based Hubspot have found that blogging is the most effective way to build traffic.

There are other ways that also should be in the mix – Linkedin, YouTube,Twitter and Facebook are the big four. There are others though. The more links you can create to your website, the higher your Google ranking.

That’s just the first floor – actually the entranceway. Once you have people interested in your company, you need convert that interest into leads and eventually sales. That I will I talk about later.

So you see you can build and live in that foundation. But it is unlikely anyone is going find you if that’s all you do.

So I get an email the other day from a Linkedin connection. He wants me to invest in the next generation Groupon. It’s not going to happen. Why? Well because frankly it wasn’t a particularly creative idea. Creativity is what drives business success.

This is what I said in reply to the request:

“You don’t get rich by doing something somebody has already done. The Groupon space is getting pretty crowded, especially now that Facebook and Google are both jumping in.

“You get wealthy by coming up something entirely new, ala Facebook, Linkedin, or something like that. Each company founder identified an unmet need and filled it. That idea goes back to the founding of the Republic. Look at Edison, Bell, Ford, the Wright Bros., Watson, Jobs, Gates and others. They got there first and built empires.

“Come with up with a completely unique concept. I will be interested then.”

Being unique and creative are two keys to business success. It doesn’t matter if your company has one or 100 competitors. If your product and the way you market it are something new and exciting you will beat your competition like a drum. Actually the product doesn’t have to be that creative. If it a fills a need better than its competitors, you are going to be ahead of those competitors. Add in marketing in a way that attracts and engages your potential customers and you have driven the ball over the fence.

My agency works with established companies of all sizes. . Our clients, no matter the size or age of their company, are entrepreneurial. Their founders saw a need for something, came up with the product to fill that need, and took it to market. They didn’t copy anybody else. Because management has stuck with that, the companies are growing and dominating their competition.

Not wanting to just do what everyone else was doing in Milwaukee was why I decided to found my own agency. A lot of agencies still don’t understand what social media is or how to use it properly. A lot of them have seemingly rejected it. As importantly they also don’t know how to meld social media with traditional marketing and public relations. To ignore any of those three marketing channels seems to me to be the height of folly. It pretty much ensures creativity will be stifled. That’s the key to our success.

Entrepreneur and author Josh Linker drove that point home at Biztimes Milwaukee’s BizTech Conference-Expo last week. He spoke about companies have two choices: be creative or die.

In 1999 Linker founded an Internet copy called ePrize. He saw that while on-line advertising was taking off there was no online promotion company. ePrize is the company that developed all those games, contests and sweepstakes on-line companies offer. It has swamped its competition.

Linker points out in his book “Disciplined Dreaming” that: “Great companies are built on ideas. They discover new and compelling ways to solve problems for customers. They play to win rather than not-to-lost. In fact, we’ve reached a time when playing it safe has become the riskiest move of all. General Motors played it safe all the way to bankruptcy. Maxwell House played it safe as the more daring and creative Starbucks supplanted it as the leader of the coffee industry.”

Risk and creativity are two of the reasons I like social media and marketing in general. There are no guarantees, but the chances of success are much than just sitting on the bench. Think about it.

Why did it fail? Because despite the sometimes dozens of leads generated for those local dealerships, the salespeople didn’t buy into it. What they wanted was instant gratification, Strong explained. They didn’t want to cultivate those potential sales, none of which were guaranteed to buy a vehicle. What they wanted was someone to walk into the dealership who wanted to buy a car immediately, he said.

Many of those listening to the presentation faulted the salespeople. How could they not want to accept a bunch of leads handed to them on that proverbial platter? Boy, those men and women were lazy, many said.

Well, I disagree – they weren’t lazy. I think it was just that no one sat down and walked them through how social media works. Not just how this sales program worked, which I believe was demonstrated, but how social media in its entirety works.

Look I know social media is taking over marketing. Still, it is only about five or six years old. To a lot of people it is new and somewhat scary. It is such a shift in the way things have been done that it still hard for many of the rank and file to grasp.

A lot of that has to do with the Great Recession. Companies from coast-to-coast cut employees. No one wanted to stand out for fear they would be the next one out the door. So they hunkered down in their cubicles, did what they were told, and did nothing to attract attention. The Japanese have a saying that goes “the nail that stands out is hammered down.” No one wanted to be that nail.

This was not an atmosphere that lent itself to creativity and risk taking.

Chrysler’s management loved and endorsed this program, Strong said. Unlike many CEOs and CMOs, Chrysler’s management actually got it. I think being the smallest U.S. auto manufacturer gave management the impetus to try something new.

Well, as Shakespeare said, “there’s the rub.” Given what’s been going on for the past three years in corporate America, do you think most people actually trust management? It appears to be no one bothered to get buy in from the people who would be the beneficiaries from the program.

Getting buy in does not mean just mean explaining this new marketing program. It means starting at zero and showing employees the benefits of social media. It cannot be assumed that they know what’s going on just because you tell them it is going to work.

Let me give you an analogy from own family’s history. My grandmother grew up on a dairy farm in upstate New York in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. For most of the time when she was a girl, her father used a team of horses to power the farm. The horses were used for everything from pulling the plow to taking the family into town.

As the farm grew more prosperous and larger, the horses could no longer handle plowing the growing acreage. So the men on the farm debated what to do. This was a tough decision. We take these things for granted nowadays, but in 1920 a growing, sparking, loud tractor was a scary concept. Apparently only after the three men had decided unanimously – with buy-in from the women – that a tractor was needed was a purchase made. The key here was everyone agreed about the need and understand the benefits.

This is what companies need to do. Even if the CEO and CMO agree on the need to a new way of marketing, it is doesn’t mean the employees will understand the need. The days of top down management are gone. That Chrysler program demonstrated that to me. Employees have to be shown and convinced that something new will work. Otherwise the entire effort is a waste of time, money and effort.

It is the fear of the uncertainty of creativity. I think to the average CEO or CMO who came through a business school being creative is a foreign concept. Most of those people are left brain types. Their dominant personality traits are that they are logical, sequential, rational, analytical and objective. They are not used to operating in an arena where creativity is demanded. Those traits often lead to the creation of boringly beige ineffective marketing.

The idea of doing something where possible outcomes cannot not always be predicted makes them nervous. So when confronted with something such as social media that demands creativity and intuitive thinking, their brains lock. The simplest thing for them to then do is either reject or ignore the ideas. The idea of a truly out there campaign – no matter how effective it might be – scares them.

I realized this at the Milwaukee-based BizTimesMedia’s 2011 BizTech Conference-Expo. EPrize founder and Chairman Josh Linker was speaking at the conference’s opening breakfast about how to empower employees to be creative. A creative company can develop a strong competitive advantage over its competitors, he argued.

Linker should know. The entrepreneur is also a jazz musician. He explained that any jazz musician that sticks strictly to the score is soon asked to leave. “This fluid, improvisation art form is all about taking risks and trying new things,” Linker wrote in his blog. “Going out on limb can be scary, but it is where the magic happens. Extending yourself outside your comfort zone is where the best rewards will be discovered.”

He goes on to say that “Jazz is also about listening. Listening to your fellow musicians, the audience, and your own creative voice. In business, that means listening to your team, your customers, your competitors, your industry, your suppliers, the latest trends and best practice, and of course, your own creativity. Through focused listening comes adaptation. Allowing the environment and your collaborators to influence the outcome as a group. Seeking inspiration and creativity from others, and adapting in real-time to your own Creative Challenge.”

At the breakfast Linker explained jazz musicians expect creativity from those with whom they perform. The jazz band is a collective creative effort.

The problem for many executives is they run their businesses from the top down. The modern corporate structure is essentially based on a military model. Think about it – there’s the CEO or commanding general. Underneath him are the division leaders. Do you think that designation was an accident? There are senior officers and junior officers, enlisted men and non-commissioned officers. The titles are different, but the roles are the same.

Not an atmosphere that lends itself to nurturing creative impulses. What those companies like is an ad agency coming in and saying we are spending $10 million on this television commercial. We are doing 15 million direct mail pieces and placing ads in 15 national publications. The campaign will look like the campaigns of all their competitors. Cut and dried – and there’s the rub. The CEO and CMO approve it and off it goes. The problem it is formulaic. It is result of that almost always fatal directive “that’s the way we have always done it.”

Many executives live the “fire and forget” marketing campaign. They feel they should not have to be involved in selling their own company. That’s the job of the marketing department and the outside agency.

Think about beer marketing or local auto dealers – all boringly the same.

All good marketing has to be creative. It is like jazz. There are core elements, but each player bends those elements, improves on them, while at the same time staying with the group. It demands that the company executives and employees take any active role in the campaign. It is their company, they should part of the effort to market its products. They need to learn to play with the band. Nine times out of ten, it is really effective. Good marketing works the same way.

There is always element of uncertainty in that. I always tell client not everything we try is going to work. We won’t know what works until we try it. Any marketer who says she does is not telling the truth. You can do all the research possible – from focus groups to surveys – and there is still no predicting the outcome.

As an aside don’t confuse that with measuring return on investment. ROI is measurable. That measurement takes place on what does work.

So if a CEO or CMO is told that the marketing effort is going to more jazz than symphony, they get nervous. It is way outside any envelope in which they operate. Someone needs to take them to a jazz club.

I also went to various news sites to see what they had to say. The only one that I could find that had anything was a three-paragraph story on the New York Times’ home page. It didn’t say much other than reporting that sources were saying Osama bin Laden was dead.

In the meantime, ABC news anchors were stretching, waiting for the President to make the official announcement. They kept showing the same stuff over and over again. My wife complained she was tired of looking at the same videos of the terrorist leader being constantly broadcast.

I spent 26 years as a print reporter. As I watched the bin Laden coverage, it help crystallize an idea I have been mulling – the way my generation of reporters and I learned to do journalism is obsolete.

The old rule was get it first, get it fast, and get it right. Well, traditional media ceded the first two as soon as Twitter and other social media sites grew up. There is no way that any traditional news site is going to beat someone on the scene of a news event who has a smart phone with a camera app. Remember the U.S. Airways flight that landed in the Hudson River a couple of year? Well, there were pictures of the plane floating in the icy water on the Net within about 60 seconds of it coming down.

Traditional media seems to have half-heartedly recognized this change. More and more news outlets are turning to Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs for information. All four local stations in Milwaukee now constantly ask viewers to submit video of anything deemed newsworthy.

The problem is people are cutting out the middleman. Why wait to watch something on the 10 p.m. news when you can go to YouTube and find it right away? Why watch a news anchor flail while waiting for an official announcement when tweets about the event are flowing at rate of hundreds a minute?

Now, there is that third part – getting it right. My friends who are still in the news business pride themselves on that. They argue that while they might not be first anymore, the information they provide is more accurate and explains the nuances of a situation better than 140 character Tweets.

I have two related thoughts about. Let provide some background about the history of news gathering to explain my points.

The template for modern journalism – both print and broadcast – evolved shortly after World War II. That model includes the three ideals I mentioned above, plus accuracy, neutrality, and objectivity.

Neutrality and objectivity are fairly recent additions to the journalism canon. I think those two words would have made the press barons of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century laugh. William Randolph Hearst used his papers to help start the Spanish-American war. If you want to get a better idea of what most newspapers were like prior to World War II, picture the National Enquirer marrying USA Today and spawning a newspaper.

For those papers, getting it first was always the first thing on an editor’s list. Accuracy was important, but not paramount. You have seen movies where newsboys would scream “Extra, Extra. Read All About It” at the top of their lungs. That happened a lot. As soon as something big broke, newspapers would rush to get the information out. If a regular edition was already off the presses, than an Extra was printed and rushed out. People really did shout “stop the presses” so information could be added.

Now, the first reports might not have been as accurate was we would expect today. As the events unfold, papers would keep rushing out Extras to update and clarify what was happening. Nobody excoriated a newspaper if those early stories had incorrect information. People knew more was coming.

If traditional media wants to stay relevant, that’s the model I think they need to adopt. I think they need to get it first and get it fast. As the events unfold, they can keep updating and correcting. If they make a mistake, say so and move on. These days people have short memories anyway.

There is one more thing about newspapers a century or so ago. They weren’t boring. They fairly screamed at you.

I think that colored weather maps and giggling anchors not withstanding, a lot television, radio, and newspapers are often just plain boring. Whether you think of that, most under 35-year-olds will not hang around anything that bores them.

Oh, I almost forgot something – the whole nuance thing. I don’t want that. As Sgt. Joe Friday used to say, “just the facts, ma’am.” I will rely on editorial writers and columnist to provide their take on the events. And then I will make my own decisions.

One of the things came up on the search was the young man’s Twitter feed. My friend told me to describe this feed as scatological would be understating things. This feed made my friend immediately decide this student was not nearly mature enough to handle a work environment. She decided anyone that would tweet in great deal about relationships clearly needed to grow up before attempting a leap into the real world.

You might read about the Buckingham Palace guard who posted some very inappropriate things about his royal bosses on Facebook. The United Kingdom’s Press Association reported that Scots Guardsman Cameron Reilly, 18, who usually stands guard outside the royal palace, called Prince William’s bride-to-be a “posh b****” and other nasty names on Facebook.

ABC news reported that Reilly reportedly wrote, “hur and william drove past me on friday n all a got was a sh*tty wave while she looked the opposite way from me, stupid stuck up cow am a not good enough for them! posh b**** am totally with u on this 1 who reely gives a f*** about hur”.

Reilly also posted anti-Semitic and racist comments on his Facebook page, the Press Association reported. The Ministry of Defense is reportedly investigating the claims and has removed Reilly from his wedding day duties. I don’t know what happens in the British Army when one screws up like that, but I am guessing young Mr. Reilly will soon be guarding the Outer Hebrides off the west coast of Scotland. The Scots say that’s where the Lord tests his storms before unleashing them on the rest of the Earth. Not always a pleasant place to be.

At any rate, these are two examples of what I hammer constantly to clients and groups when I speak. The key thing to remember is that nothing is ever private on the net. Number two, trust no one among your followers.

Once you have more than say 100 followers on Twitter, Facebook or any other site your are not going to know all of them personally. They might like you, they might not. Post something that is critical or offensive and one of those “friends” might decide to share it with the world.

Forrester Research estimates that one post on a social media site reaches approximately 150 people. If 10 of those people repeat the post, there is a potential of reaching 1,500 people. And if they repeat it and so on, your seemingly private comment has gone viral. It could also be an embarrassing picture or video. Those tend to spread even faster.

As I always clients, don’t do anything stupid because it will hang around forever. Remember the words of Ben Franklin” three can keep a secret – if two are dead.”

The cancellation of both shows marks the continuing decline of a once powerful marketing machine. I think social media is doing the same thing to conventional marketing. It won’t happen overnight – and traditional marketing and public relations should still be part of any marketing plan. However, it is going to happen.

What many people don’t know anymore is that soap operas were started in the 1930s on radio by Proctor & Gamble to sell soap and other products – hence the name. According to P&G’s corporate history in 1933 “‘Ma Perkins,’ a radio serial program sponsored by P&G’s Oxydol soap powder, aired nationally. Its popularity leads P&G brands to sponsor numerous new ‘soap operas.’ Faithful listeners become loyal buyers of P&G brands at the grocery.’” The soaps helped P&G get through the Great Depression. When radio gave way to television, the soaps easily made the jump.

The soap operas came to dominate daytime television. Soaps were “once considered the stable revenue generator of the broadcast television model: the consistently popular daytime staples that helped fund primetime experimentation,” Fast Company Expert Blogger Sam Ford said. But not anymore.

There were once a dozen soaps on the air. There are now just four. Ford wrote that many in the television industry feel those four on their last legs. I think the demise is inevitable.

Like medicine shows and Burma Shave Road Signs, soaps apparently just don’t move product anymore. And that is the ultimate aim of most television shows and other marketing mediums. If it doesn’t sell something, it isn’t going to stay around. The audiences went elsewhere for any number of reasons and the advertisers saw that.

In the case of soap operas, “Many may say it’s because the fans abandoned the genre,” Ford wrote. “The story you often hear from fans is that it’s because the shows lost their way and their interest. As soaps tried to battle over the dwindling daytime audience as if ‘soap opera fans’ were all fans of the genre more than fans of the show, little thought was put into a sustained effort to bring lapsed fans back.”

Does this sound familiar? Let’s look at what’s happening to some other mass media.

“The Audit Bureau showed that average weekday circulation at 635 newspapers declined 5 percent compared with the same six months last year,” the New York Times reported last October. “The decline last year was more than twice that, 10.6 percent, as newspapers struggled through the recession and more readers abandoned print copies for the Internet.” (emphasis mine.)

Just like in soap operas, the advertisers are going away. “Newspaper publishers are still laboring to reverse a massive decline in advertising revenue – the Newspaper Association of America reported that total industry ad revenue fell 6% in Q2,” the Reuters blog MediaFile reported in September.

The same thing is happening in television advertising. “Advertisers are losing confidence in the medium,” respondents to the Association of National Advertisers/Forrester study of national advertisers said. The survey respondents said they have “a lack of confidence in TV ad effectiveness. Sixty-two percent of respondents think that TV ads have become less effective in the past two years.”

So, where are these advertisers going? You know the answer – they are heading to the Internet, of which social media is a part. I could fill this blog with the statistics – 740 million Facebook users, 100 million-plus Linkedin members, Flickr now hosts more than five million images and so on.

Mashable predicts that in 2011, $3.08 billion will be spent on social media in the United States.

“That’s a 55% increase over the $1.99 billion U.S. advertisers reportedly spent on social networking sites in 2010, and nearly 11% of what they are expected to spend on all online advertising in the U.S. in 2011, eMarketer says,” Mashable reported. “Worldwide spending on social networks is expected to rise 71.6% to $5.97 billion, approximately 8.7% of the total amount advertisers are predicted to spend online in 2011.”

Online advertising, which includes social media, is starting to snowball, the Economist reported. “Global spending on advertising will grow by 4.5% in 2011, double the rate of the previous year, according to ZenithOptima, an ad agency,” the Economist said. “This will be led by online advertising which will increase by 16%.”

Look at the Economist chart below. Online advertising is the largest, but it’s the fastest growing.

Chart courtesy of The Economist

So like medicine shows, Burma Shave Road Signs and now soap operas, conventional marketing is slowly going away. It will take some time, but just like those other things, it will happen.

The key to that argument is that everything done in a company has to have a financial justification. Every person’s role has to be justified by the effect it has on the bottom line. The argument is that no one can make a financial case for Social Media.

On the flip side of that argument, too many so-called social media gurus think social media is the only marketing method that should be used. They argue that traditional marketing and public relations are passé. They say that using Twitter and Facebook will solve all your marketing problems.

I take issue with both lines of reasoning. It was the bottom line thinkers who almost killed the American auto industry. While General Motors, Ford and Chrysler were using profit to justify every decision, European and Asian automakers were making cars that people actually wanted to buy. Design and market need came first, not profit.

As for the gurus, they are ones causing problems for Social Media. They make outlandish claims about the power of social media. While Social Media can be effective on its own, combining it with other methods leads to much better results. As I always say to clients, you could build a house using only a hammer and saw, but it would a lot easier if  other tools are also used.

I don’t think either side understands how social media works or what its place is in the marketing firmament. I spent part of Tuesday listening to an excellent webinar sponsored by Boston-based Internet marketing company Hubspot. Entitled “Social Media Metrics” for marketing experts provided more than enough ways to show how using Social Media is not only financially justifiable, it is essential. However, they also convincingly argued it is not the only method that should be sued.

Incidentally, if you want to listen to Hubspot webinar metrics discussion go here.

The problem many pro-social media people have is that they try to separate social media from the rest of a company’s marketing efforts, Maggie Georgieva, an Inbound Marketering Manager at Hubspot.

“Social media cannot be separated from the rest of marketing,” Georgieva said during the webinar. “Being good at social media is not the same thing as being good at business. Social media should be used as one tool in marketing.”

I have been preaching that social media should be melded with traditional marketing and public relations since I founded JJC Communications three years ago. I find I achieve much better results when I combine the three methods.

The problem I think anti-social media people have is that they expect too much too soon. Plus, they focus too narrowly on only one measure of success when in reality there are many.

“It is not about how many you measuring, but it is about measuring the right things, the things that can either save you money or make you money, ” Jay Baer, social media author and strategy consultant said during the Hubspot webinar.

Some companies get too tied in measurement, Baer said. He noted that at some point a company has to decide what’s the ROI of measuring ROI. Spending too much time on measuring takes away from other important items, especially client retention and engagement, he noted.

Simply measuring for measurements sake should not be the goal, added Amber Naslund, vice president of social strategy at Radian6, a Chicago-based social media strategy company. The key is to keep measurement as stripped down and simple as possible so an executive can concentrate on what’s most important.

The other thing companies have to remember is not to measure too soon, Naslund said. Data gathering should become as soon as possible. However, no one should try to draw any conclusions until there is at least four or more months of data in the can, she said.

“The goal is not be good at social media,” Baer said. “The goal is to be good at business because of social media. Those are not the same things.”

If you want to see how this can work for your company, contact me – especially if you are in Southeastern Wisconsin or Northern Illinois. Using the trilogy of social media, public relations and traditional marketing, together we can make your business grow.

For the longest time I couldn’t figure out what I was getting so much spam. It didn’t appear to be hackers or anyone trying to do something malicious. I used to just hit the spam delete button without bothering to ever look at anything that in the filter.

Curious a couple of weeks ago about where all this detritus was coming from, I started looking at the senders’ email addresses. The light bulb went on. The spam generators were attempting to use my blog for “Black Hat” search engine optimization. They were attempting to raise their sites Google rankings by placing links on my blog site.

It works this way. Search engines, in particular Google require ways to confirm page relevancy. One method is to examine for one-way links coming directly from relevant websites. The more links into the website, the higher the search ranking.

Since most people searching for something rarely go beyond the first page of Google’s results, companies work very hard to increase the links to their pages. How they do that is called search engine optimization or SEO. I use “White Hat” SEO tactics for this blog.

There are a number of ways to do that, including using key words that will show up in search engines, trading links with other bloggers, and posting links to my blog in public forums. All of that is accepted practice perfectly legitimate.

Then there are the Black Hat tactics. As I like do, let’s use an example. In this case, let’s discuss that well-known department chain J.C. Penney.  During the 2010 holiday shopping period, the department store started showing up on the first page of Google for almost every product it sold. Highly unlikely that would happen on its own.

In February, the New York Times reported that it had “asked an expert in online search, Doug Pierce of Blue Fountain Media in New York, to study this question, as well as Penney’s astoundingly strong search-term performance in recent months. What he found suggests that the digital age’s most mundane act, the Google search, often represents layer upon layer of intrigue. And the intrigue starts in the sprawling, subterranean world of “black hat” optimization, the dark art of raising the profile of a Web site with methods that Google considers tantamount to cheating.

“Despite the cowboy outlaw connotations, black-hat services are not illegal, but trafficking in them risks the wrath of Google. The company draws a pretty thick line between techniques it considers deceptive and “white hat” approaches, which are offered by hundreds of consulting firms and are legitimate ways to increase a site’s visibility. Penney’s results were derived from methods on the wrong side of that line, says Mr. Pierce. He described the optimization as the most ambitious attempt to game Google’s search results that he has ever seen.

“Actually, it’s the most ambitious attempt I’ve ever heard of,” he said. “This whole thing just blew me away. Especially for such a major brand. You’d think they would have people around them that would know better.”

What someone did – Penney’s denies it had anything to do with the effort – was place links on thousands of websites all over the world that led directly to JCPenney.com The more links, the higher the Google search ranking. When the Times notified Google, punishment was swift, the newspaper reported.

Google pushed J.C. Penney search results to its back pages. (The Bob Dylan reference is intentional.) Suddenly it was very hard to find anything the company sold.

J.C. Penney paid the price for someone’s overzealous marketing effort. To me, Black Hat SEO is like an athlete who uses performance drugs. Would that person have won without the chemical boost?

The sad thing to me, beyond the unethical practice, is how Black Hat SEO calls all search results into question. I am willing to be bet that 99.9 percent of people on the Web don’t cheat. But all it takes is few people to try and game the system to make everyone suspicious. That benefits no one.

I get an email from the friend the other day, asking about particular social media site. My friends will often ask me which sites I recommend or what I think of a particular site.

Well, as I confessed to my friend, I had never heard of this site. That got me thinking. It seems like new sites are popping faster than dandelions in my lawn in June. But is each of these sites necessary? If someone did a business study of every social media site out there could many of them make a case for their existence?

Obviously, I am active user of social media. I am a social media consultant. I blog, I tweet, I post on Facebook, I use Linkedin incessantly and I am moving more and more onto YouTube. I can make a case for all of those sites. A large part of their appeal is that they are the biggest and easiest to use (more about that second point later.)

I also am a member of Orkut and I just joined a Chinese site called Ushi. I joined Orkut because it has a large number of users in South America and India. Ushi is self-described as the Chinese Linkedin. I do not currently do business in any of those places. But there could time when I do, so I want to have a presence there.

The key to all these sites is simplicity and ease of use. I don’t have to do much to interact with them. Which is good, but I am very busy. The less time I have to spend getting the maximum benefit is what I look for.

I also belong to Plaxo and Xing, but I am not sure why. I really don’t get much out of them.

Frankly, I think I am connected to enough sites. I don’t need any more sites. Yet, I keep getting invited to join others – a couple everyday. The latest is Facebook’s BranchOut. I joined it because I was curious, but so far I see no value in it. It doesn’t do anything that Linkedin or a regular Facebook doesn’t already do.

That’s my complaint about many of the newer sites. They are just duplicates of what’s already being done. Yeah, they might a couple of their own bells and whistles, but not enough to make them significantly different.

I am all for competition if it improves things, but I don’t see any improvement coming out of any of these. They are just not unique. I think this is an area that pretty much been covered.

It kind reminds me of television. ABC has “Dancing With the Stars,” so Fox comes out with “So You Think You Can Dance.” How many cop and doctors shows are on network television. It is all about being a copycat. Eventually, the market gets saturated.

People keep talking about the new Facebook or the next Linkedin. But the sites that might beat those are going to be something entirely new. They are not going to be clones of what already exists.

The newer sites that have taken off, Groupon as an example, did something new.  I belong to Groupon because I reap the benefits.

As long as I am ranting here, I have another beef about the new sites. There are just to many hurdles to join most of them. You want me as a member – make it simple. I think Groupon took me about a minute to join. Not so most of these new sites.  Name, email address, and a password are all that is needed. I will decide if I want to post a profile or a picture. It takes too much time. Yet, they ask for a lot of information. It is not worth my time to supply it.

When the dandelions take over, I pull them out by the roots. When I get site requests, I just ignore. It’s the best of both worlds.

This happens often to everyone in the agency business. You walk into the first planning meeting with a client just after the contracts have been signed. You have an overstuffed bundle of charts and information under your arm, plus a PowerPoint presentation on all of the things you are getting ready to accomplish

Right after the welcomes and introductions are completed, you get ready to start the presentation. But before you can say a word, the CEO or CMO looks at you and says: “we want to triple our sales within six months. We expect that your marketing will do that for us.”

That statement makes your stomach jump your throat. Your heart starts trying to beat its way out of your chest. There’s enough sweat coming off your body to rehydrate Death Valley. You panicked mind asks what the hell just happened?

Well, what happened is you didn’t do a sanity check with your client. You did nothing to manage that client’s expectations. Here’s what you should have done.

The first we at JJC Communications LLC do after signing a client is do a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Trouble analysis. It is usually a called SWOT analysis. Such an analysis is not that hard to do.

The Wikipedia entry best explains what is a SWOT analysis:

The aim of any SWOT analysis is to identify the key internal and external factors that are important to achieving the objective. These come from within the company’s unique value chain. SWOT analysis groups key pieces of information into two main categories:

• Internal factors – The strengths and weaknesses internal to the organization.
• External factors – The opportunities and threats presented by the external environment to the organization.

The internal factors may be viewed as strengths or weaknesses depending upon their impact on the organization’s objectives. What may represent strengths with respect to one objective may be weaknesses for another objective. The factors may include all of the 4P’s; as well as personnel, finance, manufacturing capabilities, and so on. The external factors may include macroeconomic matters, technological change, legislation, and socio-cultural changes, as well as changes in the marketplace or competitive position. The results are often presented in the form of a matrix.”

We usually schedule one for a Saturday. It has to be done when there are no other distractions. It can get pretty intense. There is a lot of discussion and a lot of back–and-forth.

This is often the first time management has sat down and examined what they are doing. As that television commercial goes, this is often an aha moment. That CEO or CMO realizes that sales are not going to increase astronomically in the first six months of a marketing effort.

We are now adding something to the mix, something I suggest all of you out there do with your clients. We now do a Political, Environmental, Social and Technical, or PEST, analysis.

My thanks to Laura Schmitz, business development manager at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Small Business Development Center for teaching me about this. As a plug, I highly recommend if you live in the Milwaukee area and are considering starting a business, avail yourself of UWM’s Small Development Center.

What a PEST analysis does is tell you and your client about all those factors you have little or no control over. You want to know what these factors so you don’t waste your time on them.

Again because Wikipedia summarizes it better than I can, here’s what they say:

• Political factors are how and to what degree a government intervenes in the economy. Specifically, political factors include areas such as tax policy, labor law, environmental law, trade restrictions, tariffs, and political stability.
• Economic factors include economic growth, interest rates, exchange rates and the inflation rate. These factors have major impacts on how businesses operate and make decisions. For example, interest rates affect a firm’s cost of capital and therefore to what extent it grows and expands.
• Social factors include the cultural aspects and include health consciousness, population growth rate, age distribution, career attitudes and emphasis on safety. Trends in social factors affect the demand for a company’s products and how that company operates.
• Technological factors include technological aspects such as R&D activity, automation, technology incentives and the rate of technological change. They can determine barriers to entry, minimum efficient production level and influence outsourcing decisions. Furthermore, technological shifts can affect costs, quality, and lead to innovation

After the analysis is completed we create a plan. Of course, there are other factors that go into a plan, including market research, and analysis of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses. But SWOT and PEST (readers and insert pun here) are the most important. Do those two, do them well, and you will find you manage client expectations.

The other day I received an email through my Linkedin offering to sell me a high-end golf villa near Disney World in Orlando. When I replied I wasn’t on Linkedin to have people try and sell me things, the emailer said he was trying to provide a service. Say what? A sales appeal is not a service.

Besides being incredibly tacky, the would-be seller violated a central tenant of social media. He was trying to push marketing by making statements that included “buy it now,” “there are limited quantities”, “they are going fast,” etc. Nowhere in the email did it tell my anything about these “villas.” Only that they were low-priced and they were seeking foreign buyers. There was a link provided.

In social media, you want me to buy something reasons must be provided. Those reasons cannot come from the seller. Why should I believe the seller who has a clear self-interest in making things look good, no matter the real condition? I want third-party endorsements. That’s what influences my decision to buy.

Incidentally, my ever-present Webster’s Dictionary defines villa as “a country house or estate, especially when large or luxurious and used as a retreat or summer home.” The company’s website says these “villas” are Villa Condominiums. A condo is defined as a multi-unit building or a series of connected buildings. So, saying something is a villa condominium is an oxymoron. Sorry, I am a language geek.

Unfortunately, this kind of pitch is happening more often I am seeing posts promising 50,000 followers if I only do this or that. Would you really want to pick followers that way? It is true that I have a lot of followers on Facebook, Linkedin and Twitter. But I have never used any kind of automated program. I have built my following organically, one at time.

What these people are doing is not what social media is all about. Quite the opposite actually. I think it is fair to say social media became popular because of tactics like that erstwhile real estate salesman and others operating like that.

One of the largest appeals of social media to me is honesty. You expect people who marketing to be honest. If they are not they get outed. As I am sure you all know, that’s a very bad thing. Many a company has rued the day when they got caught fudging the truth.

On the same theme, I keep getting requests from people I have never met to endorse them. My rules for endorsement are I have to know you, worked with you, or had a long on-line relationship with you. I do not endorse strangers. I am lending my authority to people I endorse. It is not something I do lightly.

In fact, that is something that is beginning to disturb me about Facebook’s BranchOut. People join my “empire” and then I am asked to endorse them. I don’t know most of these people. I am sure they are fine people, but I just said I don’t endorse those I don’t know.

This is all just indicative of what can wrong with social media when the people who use don’t understand its purpose. What to do about it? Whenever you run into one of them, call them out. It is the only way to deal with it.

Social media is not going away. Quite the opposite, actually. Look at the data Marketing Sherpa collected on marketing tactics for 2011.

“As marketing strategies evolve from outbound to inbound tactics, there is also a shift in the ways in which money and resources are spent. We asked more than 1,100 marketers how they foresaw budgets changing in 2011 for the following marketing tactics,” Marketing Sherpa wrote. This is what they found:

Look at the chart carefully – 1,100 marketers see the budgets for websites, search (search engine optimization/pay per click), and social media increasing by more than 50 percent. That doesn’t sound to me like social media is going anywhere.

In order for any of these marketing methods to prove successful, a company must use the three together.  A company needs a top-flight webpage so potential customers like what they see when they land there. Search engine optimization is key so potential customers find that website. Social media is needed to create the inbound links to the website so search engines find it. A marketing campaign that doesn’t use all three is a like two-legged stool.

So, I am not sure why some people seem to think social media is going away. I do have some hypothesis though.

First, I think many people are comparing Facebook, Google, Twitter, Linked in, YouTube and other social media sites to companies that were created during the dot-com bubble of the 1990s. That rationale doesn’t apply to the current crop of digital companies. What killed most of the dot com companies is that they never made a profit. Plus, their stock prices were widely inflated. When the recession of 2001 hit and the investment spigot was turned off, those high fliers suddenly had the aerodynamic properties of a rock.

There were a lot of lessons learned in that period. Companies just don’t operate like that anymore.

As I said before, I think some people are just trying to be provocative. They want to be contrarians. Kind of like the people of Vermont, who will never do what the rest of the nation does. Those social media contrarians just want to start an argument. They see themselves as loners, as people who don’t follow the crowd. I image their forebears rode horses and used kerosene lamps by choice well into the 1930s.

Finally, I think there are just some people who hate the whole concept of social media. They have been using the old ways for decades, dammit, and those methods work just fine. They don’t want to take the time to learn something new. It is too confusing for them. Before you automatically assume these people are all old, I was able to qualify for an over 55 discount the other night. And I love social media.

I suppose it is possible one of the more popular social media sites will go away. I don’t think that will happen, but one never knows. Things do change. I grew up with one phone company, three television stations, a record player and a typewriter. The companies that produced those items either went away or changed out of necessity. Yes, I know some places are again selling turntables and other old technologies. But some places still sell candles, but I don’t see them again becoming our primary source of light.

However, the functions those old ways doing things performed did not. I think the same is true of social media. If Facebook or Linked in disappear, something will take their place. Social media is just too dominant to think otherwise.

What surprises me is how many people believe what they read. They apparently have no built-in B.S. filter. Seeing something posted on Facebook or tweeted apparently bestows some kind of seal of approval. Well, to time burst that bubble. People can and do lie on the Internet all the time. As a reader and a consumer you have to determine whether what a company is telling you, or a blogger is saying, is true.

Here are two things that spread all over the net in which everyone should have known better to ever believe. The first one is funny; the second one had serious repercussions that are still being felt around the world.

In the first case, the Weekly World News reported that Mark Zuckerberg was exhausted. So exhausted that in fact he was going to shut down Facebook. The Weekly World News is the same “newspaper” that reports that aliens regularly meet with the president of the United States and other world leaders.

“The questionable story apparently sent Facebook users into a panic,” The New York Daily News reported. “The phrase “is Facebook shutting down” was the 14th most searched for on Google Saturday (Jan. 8th) and the 10th most as of Sunday (Jan.9th) morning.

“On Facebook itself, groups like “Against shutting down Facebook on 15th of March” popped up with the slogan “No Facebook, No Party”. On Twitter, users fretted about what would happen to their pictures – not to mention social lives.”
That people believed this amazes me. I assume that it spread through the Internet pretty quickly. Didn’t anyone check the source? Didn’t anyone notice Facebook is thinking of going public?

Remember what I said in Monday’s blog about the need for speed when it comes to social media. This is a perfect example of why. Many people will believe something no matter how outlandish it might seem.

Facebook quashed the rumor Sunday evening by issuing a press release saying it had no plans to close. “We didn’t get the memo about shutting down, so we’ll keep working away,” the company said. “We aren’t going anywhere; we’re just getting started.”
The second rumor actually began about 12 years ago. While the conventional media initially spread it, social media kept it alive a lot longer than it should of. In this case, people died because of the idiocy of others.
In this case, “in 1998 English Doctor Andrew Wakefield published a study in another British medical journal, The Lancet suggesting that the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine could cause autism,” The Washington Post reported. “The study triggered international alarm about vaccines, but quickly came under intense criticism, was discredited by follow-up research, and was eventually formally retracted by the journal.

“Nevertheless, the incidence of childhood measles rose in Great Britain and elsewhere after Wakefield’s study was published, as worried parents refused to have their children vaccinated against the potentially deadly disease. Parents have also shunned other vaccines. And even after Wakefield’s work was debunked, he continues his research in the United States and to have loyal, highly vocal supporters.”

There were four reported deaths of children in England and Ireland caused by their parents’ failure to immunize them with the MMR vaccine. Hundreds of children were unnecessarily ill because of the failure to immunize.

As a personal note, I had measles as a child. That was before the vaccine was developed. I was very, very ill. I do not recommend any parent putting their child through that.

Yet despite all of the evidence to the contrary, there are people out there who still insist that it was a vaccine that caused their child’s Autism. Google Autism and vaccines and look at the some of the results. A study released last March said one in four Americans believe there is a link between Autism and vaccinations. Despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary, people seem more willing to believe bloggers and others using social media. It just amazes me. I don’t understand it.

As my late father used to say: “people don’t seem to know how to use the brains they were born with.” To which my grandfather would add: “there’s so sense in being stupid unless you can demonstrate it.”

The old model emphasized individuality, the star system. Company’s now know that to enhance creativity it is important to create a culture that fosters it. Companies that create an atmosphere of support, innovate and creativity will be the ones that lead their industries. It will also lead to happier employees, something I would think every company wants.

When people in companies and teams feel engaged, the benefits are significant. Towers Watson (formerly Towers Perrin), the global professional services firm, interviewed 90,000 employees in 18 countries, and found companies with high employee engagement had a 19 percent increase in operating income and almost a 28 percent growth in earnings per share. Conversely, companies with low levels of engagement saw operating income drop more than 32 percent and earnings per share decline over 11 percent.

The old idea was that as you went up the hierarchy, somehow you got smarter. Leadership was viewed as the ability to tell people what to do, not to listen employees. In every innovative company today, that idea has gone away. Now the mantra is “all of us are smarter than one of us.”

Companies such as Zappos Shoes, Starbucks Dunkin’ Donuts, Apple, Southwest Airlines and many others have found success comes from dialog, not lectures.

While it should be obvious why internal communication is so important, I often find company leaders don’t get it. Here’s why – a Harvard Business School study found that the less information a company provides its employees, the more likely they are to start and spread rumors. It’s simple, nature abhors a vacuum. If that vacuum is not filled with real information, someone is going to fill it with male bovine excrement.

Now, I am sure all of your companies work to put out the correct information. But there are obstacles: ensuring employees just don’t just delete the email, then ensuring that they open it, and that they read the entire message. If that all happens, you still have to hope employees take the time to think and understand the messages so they are able to respond appropriately.  That’s why there has to be a face-to-face component of communications either with individuals or in a group.

However, face-to-face meeting are not as always effective as companies would like to think. When I was a reporter I covered crime in Detroit and its suburbs. I learned something  then from police officers that still applies – there is nothing so unreliable as an eyewitness. People hear and interpret the same message in different ways.

Plus, logistics can get in the way of face-to-face meetings. I work with a multinational company that has offices in the U.S., China, India and England. How can a company like that hold face-to-face meetings with its employees?

Social media can solve those problems change. Instead of sending out that mass email or posting on the company Intranet in hopes people will take the time to read it, social media provides tools help employees actively participate in creating and sharing information. It is a much better way to get people to listen and understand what you are saying.

Of course, I know social media scares a lot of senior executives. They worry it will affect productivity. They are concerned about allowing employees to create content. The IT department often has a dozen reasons why employees should not be allowed to use social media.

Another fear I often hear is that my employees are going to use the new tools to complain about the company. Yeah, they are going to do that. That’s a good thing. Who you would rather have an employee complain to – someone in the company who can fix the problem – or their friends?

As I said before, all of us are smarter than one of us. From an employee’s complaint could come a solution to a long-standing problem. What this all means is that you can be internal ambassadors and facilitators for your company. Social media gives you the ability to do that. You can hear about and solve problems before they blow up.

Anticipating how to handle a crisis before it occurs should be a key part of any company’s business plan. The one thing social media has probably made more difficult is crisis communications. A company now usually has minutes, possibly no more than an hour, to prevent a small crisis from growing into a major disaster. A response has to be immediate – within those same minutes of the crisis.

There is no alternative, no other option.

Here in my city of Milwaukee is an example of what happens when the crisis is more nimble than the responders. A suburban mall found itself the victim of what was apparently a flash mob that wreaked havoc throughout the shopping center. Then mall management made things worse by the way it responded

Businesses need planning and practice to be ready for a practice. A business has to have a crisis communications plan in place long before the crisis happens. To ensure the plan works when needed, it has to be rehearsed constantly.

Think about it. Fire Departments, police departments, the military and a host of other agencies constantly train. They do it so when they have to go into action everyone knows what to do.

Here’s what happened to Mayfair Mall in Wauwatosa, WI. I should note that it is one of the top shopping destinations in the Milwaukee metro area and is almost always crowded. In this case, I think the flash mob organizers decided that the crowd of shoppers would be the perfect audience for their “performance.”

For those who have not heard the term flash mob, Wikipedia defines it as a “large group of people who assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse. The term flash mob is generally applied only to gatherings organized via telecommunications, social media, or viral emails.”

At Mayfair a group of several dozen teenagers raced through the mall, knocking over displays, running up and down escalators, which scared customers and staff. Mall management said the event was too organized to have been a spontaneous occurrence. They suspect it was organized via Facebook, Twitter or any number of other sites. Adding to the commotion was an apparent attempted robbery in the mall parking lot. Authorities have not said if the robbery was related to the flash mob but a shot was fired, which caused even more panic among. Luckily no one was hurt.

Mall management said they monitor social media sites to ensure things like this don’t happen. They said they were able to stop a flash mob planned for two days before Christmas. In that one, a group of high school students was planning on dancing in the mall.

If mall management is monitoring social media, someone fell asleep at the switch on the disruptive flash mob. For something this large, there had to be multiple posts on Twitter and Facebook. That’s how the word gets spread, by constant repetition across the web. Someone should have caught this.

It is possible the word was spread via text message. Unless you work for the National Security Agency, or some other federal investigative agency concerned with terrorism, those messages cannot be tracked. In that case mall management would not have had advance warning.

Even if Mayfair management did not have advance warning, the ball was still dropped after the incident. The flash mob happened Jan. 2. Mall management waited until the afternoon of Jan. 3rd to respond which meant for 24 hours Mayfair Mall lost control of its brand. In social media years that’s a lifetime. The mall was being defined by the hundreds of comments most of them negative made on social media sites and to the local media

When Mall management finally did respond, they did it by issuing a press release. Kind of like using a carrier pigeon to get the message out. What management said was just as bad.

Most of the statement condemned the group who disrupted the mall. It wasn’t until almost the end of the statement that management said: “the safety and security of our guests are always our top priorities.  We will not tolerate any behavior that compromises that safety.  As a result of this incident, we anticipate that there will be operational changes as well as consequences for those involved.”

What the statement should have said was that security was being increased immediately and there would be an even stronger policy governing when teenagers could be in the mall. The mall later did announce that it was changing its policy regarding when teenagers would be allowed in the mall. But that happened after the initial flurry of reports on the incident, which didn’t have the effect it would have had if the mall had made the announcement on the same day as the incident.

Plus Mayfair competitor Bayshore Mall announced changes to its policy for teenager access at the same time. There have been no incidents at Bayshore so that mall looked proactive. Mayfair suffered by comparison.

In other words, management be nimble, management be quick, or the business is going to be burned by something a lot hotter than a candlestick.

Yet, it still amazes me that in this digital age of electronic sharing of everything people have not internalized that rule. It hey did, it would keep them of trouble of their own making. Not following that rule will always lead to public relations problems and a lot of collateral damage.

The latest person to fall victim to a failure to pay attention to Franklin’s aphorism is U.S. Navy Capt. Owen Honors. Honors’ career was derailed because of a series of videos he made when he was the executive officer of the U.S.S. Enterprise. According to the Norfolk Virginian-Pilot newspaper, “The videos were a series of profanity-laced comedy sketches that were broadcast on the USS Enterprise via closed-circuit television.” Some were described as homophobic.

Did Honors think no one was ever going to talk about this to an outsider? But as Ben said, secrets just cannot be kept. In Honors’ case, almost 6,000 men and women who crew the aircraft carrier saw these videos. The odds were better than even that someone was going to talk.

I not am going to talk about the content of the videos or Honors intent in producing them. I am not seen the videos. From everything I have read, Honors was a rising star in the Navy. He apparently was an excellent leader slated to become an admiral. Perhaps he one day would have become Chief of Naval Operations – the overall Navy commander. Not anymore.

This entire situation is about how the videos were perceived and the fallout from their release. There are numerous stories talking about how the videos show the sexist, homophobic culture that the writers claim permeate the military. Again, I have no idea if that’s an accurate picture of our fighting men and women. I would say not from own experiences dealing with our armed forces. I do pro bono work for groups that work with veterans. I married into a military family. I have a lot of experience with our military.

However, truth does not matter, only the perception. I tell this to clients all the time. Perception is reality as far as the outside world is concerned. That’s why you have to be careful because the odds are very good that what you view as an off-hand remark could come back to bite and bite hard.

Remember, this is the era of social media. What once might not have spread beyond a city block will now zip around the world in minutes. Once the problem is out of the box, there is nothing that can be done to put it back.

As Capt. Honors unfortunately found out, it is not just the individual who will get burned. It can be an entire organization.

HowHH

I see a lot of confused expressions. People have seen so many ads from self-described social media “gurus” promising thousands of followers with only a mouse click or two. Those charlatans have people convinced that building a list of followers is as simple as picking up a gallon of milk. My question always comes as a shock.

The answer is both simple and complex. In order to build a good list of followers, you have to provide something that will be of interest. A blog or an informative website is a good place to start. In other words, content is king. I am going to talk about blogs because I think a blog is the foundation of every successful social media campaign.

Don’t think providing interesting content is enough – it’s not.

This blog has several thousand which took a long time to build That readership took a long time to build. I have been publishing now for almost two years and I am proud to say this is the 137^th blog I have written and published.

The growth has been organic. In other words, people found me. I post my blog links on a number of sites, but that’s the equivalent of posting a billboard.

My readership numbered in the 10s of people for the first couple of months. I hope my readership grew because people found what I wrote interesting. I pushed this blog on every site that would let me. That led to curious people checking it out.

If they liked what they found, they told others. Those people started to read me and they spread the word. You get the idea. That support – for which I will always be grateful for – led to potential clients seeking out my business. That in turn led to clients hiring me.

None of that would have happened, or continue to happen, if I had not given people a reason to follow me. They will stop following if I don’t continue to give them something they want.

Writing a blog is not easy. I have an advantage in that I have been a professional writer for most of my adult life. I am used to cranking out copy. But first, I have to come up with a topic. That is not always easy.

It takes me at least four or five hours to write the blog and another hour to rewrite it. If the blog is a false starter – if I don’t like the topic after all, or the copy is just not flowing – add in a couple of hours to find another topic.

After that Heather Asiyanbi generously proof reads and edits it. After a half an hour making the corrections she has made, it takes post takes another 30 minutes or so to get ready post. Actually posting takes about an hour, give or take. It is a large time investment.

It is worth it though. First I enjoy writing blog because my core skill. For me, writing is more of an avocation than a job. I cannot imagine doing something that doesn’t involve writing.

Second, people seem to enjoy it. I average about 10 comments a blog, posted both on the blog and on various social media sites. Also, it gets retweeted a lot, something else for which I am also very grateful.

Third, it gets the word out about my business and myself. I have had clients contact me because of the blog. That is very gratifying.

If you want more followers, give people a reason to do that.

It is no secret right now there are more people looking for jobs than there are jobs to be filled. Job-hunting has become a survival of those able to stand out. These might not have the best qualifications, but they know to market themselves.

Most job hunters also know that LinkedIn is now the place recruiters look first when trying to fill a position. So, people do everything they can to punch up their profiles to make themselves stand out. Job hunters want to be unique, knowing unique is what gets one hired. They also want to use those words and phrases that will make a recruiter jump at the chance to hire them.

However, for a lot of people, they are not as unique as they think they might be.  LinkedIn recently compiled a list of the 10 most overused terms and phrases within the profiles of its 85 million members. Here they are:

1. Extensive experience

2. Innovative

3. Motivated

4. Results-oriented

5. Dynamic

6. Proven track record

7. Team player

8. Fast-paced

9. Problem solver

10. Entrepreneurial

“We wanted to reveal insights that help professionals make better choices about how to position themselves online,” DJ Patil, LinkedIn’s lead data analyst, said in a statement to CNN.

Look, selling yourself is no different than selling a product. Just as potential customers respond better to a unique message, potential employers respond better to a unique profile. Using any of those phrases listed above is the equivalent of saying “this product is the best.”

As we all know, phrases like that accomplish nothing. The same is true of saying you have extensive experience. It just doesn’t work.

Let me put it another way. As many of you may or may not know, I am writing a novel. Because I was news writer for over two decades, I knew I had to change my writing style. So I went to classes at a wonderful place in Milwaukee called Redbird Studios. There I took a course called “Shut Up and Write” taught by Judy Bridges, one of the finest writers I ever worked with.

One of Judy’s most important rules about writing was “show it, don’t say it.”  Basically that means be descriptive. Don’t say your character was breathing hard. Say something such as the character was so winded his lungs couldn’t handle his body’s demands for oxygen.

The same holds true for a profile, a resume or a business pitch. Don’t say you are innovative. Give examples of how you were innovative in your last job. Showing it, not saying it, might be the difference between effectively marketing yourself and seeing your resume placed in the electronic circular file.

I have to say that as criteria for buying a personal hygiene product, knowing that the manufacturer  sponsors concerts is not even on the list. I tend to select the brands that perform the best according to my needs.

As I was taking the survey, I started thinking about companies that sponsor concerts or buy stadium-naming rights or plaster their names all over race cars. I know the theory is that potential customers will buy a product because of the company sponsorship. Frankly, I don’t buy it – figuratively or literally.

As an aside, I have to again laud my Green Bay Packers. They have played in Lambeau Field since 1957. They still play in Lambeau Field. There is no Lambeau Field sponsored by Acme Meatpacking. The Packers will not allow their stadium to be sullied by some company seeking to market its products. Ditto for the New York Yankees.

I think social media has changed consumers’ attitudes. Companies have, for the most part, learned they have to sell a quality product. If they don’t, the Internet will rise up and slap them down. It doesn’t matter whether the logo is plastered on the side of a race car.

I think the companies who spend some of their money on sponsorships are, for the most part, wasting their money.

There is an exception to that though. If I see a company supporting a cause I agree with, I am more likely to consider their product. My wife and I back a number of charitable organizations, including the American Diabetes Association and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. If I see a company contributing to those organizations, I will take a look at what they are selling.

Even then, I will take the time to check the company out. There are companies that will make charitable contributions as a way to hide their real image. Tobacco companies, as an example, can make all the contributions they want, I will never buy their products.

Which brings me to another point. I will sometimes not buy a product because of something the company has endorsed. I am not going to discuss my beliefs here. But if a company endorses something I feel is morally wrong, I am not going to buy their product.

Frankly, I think it would be a lot smarter if companies used their endorsement dollars to make products. They would probably make a lot more money that way.

I want to give a huge thanks to Heather Asiyanbi, a Milwaukee-area writer who generously has given her time to become my editor. I owe her a huge debt of gratitude for her work.

A cherished belief of mine about the Internet was crushed yesterday, making me rethink the whole idea of search engine optimization. Let me explain.

I have always encouraged my clients to make sure their customers have a place to comment on the client’s products. It makes sense for a lot of reasons, including the most important – Google rankings. The higher a Google ranking, the easier it is for a potential customer to find one of my clients.

Now, I always thought it was the good comments that drove a customer’s Google rankings. After all, it is illogical to think the bad comments would influence page rankings. Why would Google allow a company with terrible customer ratings to dominate the rankings? If you had a bad experience with a store, you certainly wouldn’t send a friend there.

Well, apparently Google is not so discerning. A Brooklyn-based company known as DecorMyEyes.com has some of the worst customer rankings I have ever seen. Yet it shows up on the first page of a Google search for eyeglasses.

As reported Nov. 26^th by The New York Times’ David Segal, company owner Vitaly Borker discovered that it really doesn’t matter what is said about a company. All that matters is that something is said.

In response to the negative comments, Segal said Borker wrote a blog post using a pseudonym. He thumbed his nose at all of his dissatisfied customers.

“’Hello, My name is Stanley with DecorMyEyes.com,’”the post began. “I just wanted to let you guys know that the more replies you people post, the more business and the more hits and sales I get. My goal is NEGATIVE advertisement.”

“It’s all part of a sales strategy,” he said. Online chatter about DecorMyEyes, even furious online chatter, pushed the site higher in Google search results, which led to greater sales. He closed with a sardonic expression of gratitude: ‘I never had the amount of traffic I have now since my 1st complaint. I am in heaven.’”

That burst my bubble, I must say. I always thought Google, and other search engines, looked for the positive results when considering rankings. I assumed that the wizards at Google had created an algorithm that considered the tenor of comments.

As Segal wrote: Which means the owner of DecorMyEyes might be more than just a combustible bully with a mean streak and a potty mouth. He might also be a pioneer of a new brand of anti-salesmanship — utterly noxious retail — that is facilitated by the quirks and shortcomings of Internet commerce and that tramples long-cherished traditions of customer service, like deference and charm.

“I’ve exploited this opportunity because it works,” Borker told Segal. “No matter where they post their negative comments, it helps my return on investment. So I decided, why not use that negativity to my advantage?”

This bothers me. What this appears to mean is no matter what one posts about a retailer, it helps them if they know how to game the system.

There is an old adage from the early days of public relations that goes, “any publicity is good publicity.” The other is, “I don’t care what you say about me as long as you get my name right.”

Those are both from public relations’ dark ages – the days of press agents, three martini lunches, and sometimes out-and out-lies. I had hoped we had moved beyond all of that. This kind of thing could destroy consumer confidence in web searches. That is not good for any reputable company that relies on the web.

I hope Google steps up and figures out a way to deal with this.

Welcome back from Thanksgiving all. I hope all of you had a great holiday and much to be thankful for. For my non-US readers, I hope you also had a good week.

A plastic surgeon in Chicago is taking great umbrage at the anonymous negative reviews some of his patients have posted about him. Dr. Jay Pensler is so upset he is suing three of the patients who posted the anonymous comments.

How did Pensler find out who those anonymous patients/posters were? His attorney subpoenaed the sites where the comments were posted – Yelp and Citysearch. The attorney ultimately found the IP addresses to identify the computers seven reviewers used to make their comments.

Pensler is now suing three of them for making false and defamatory statements. He is asking for $100,000 each in damages.

I am not going to get into whether Pensler is a good or bad surgeon. I have no idea. If you want to read the negative comments and more about the case itself go here and here.

What I am concerned about is the fact that Pensler was able to find out who the reviewers were. According to Fox Chicago News, a Yelp spokeswoman said: “When a business owner attempts to stifle free speech with legal action, it is disappointing and damaging to consumers at large. At Yelp, we take every action to protect the privacy of our users; we must also comply with the law.”

Citysearch’s privacy policy states that its privacy policy allows the website to disclose a user’s information “in response to a subpoena or similar investigative demand.”

I should note federal law protects the websites. They cannot be held liable for third party postings over which they have no control.

While I can see the doctor’s point, I think websites giving up IP addresses and other information could have a chilling effect on honest discourse on the web. To me it is not a good idea.

One of the key parts of social media is public reviews. I rely on them for many things, as I suspect many others do. I want to know if a doctor, in the opinion of his patients is competent. I want to know how the service is at a particular restaurant. I also post comments. I don’t want worry about getting sued for stating my opinion.

When I was a reporter, I sometimes had to use anonymous sources. When writing on a sensitive topic, many people don’t want to be identified. They are afraid of retribution or harassment. That is not an uncommon reaction.

There are times when people should not remain anonymous. The argument many donors made for staying anonymous during the recent midterm elections was the fear of harassment. I disagree with that. When one is trying to influence an election, then your name should be made public.

I also think Pensler’s decision to sue is backfiring on him. The lawsuit has raised the issue’s profile. People who had never heard of Pensler now know some of his patients objected to his treatments.

Obviously there are some postings that cross the line. Falsely accusing someone of committing a crime would be an example. However, people should have the right to state their opinions without fear of retribution.

The people that posted about Dr. Pensler are what I would consider “civilians.” They are just ordinary people stating their opinion. They did not plan on being sued, nor should they be, for expressing their opinion.

I think that holds true for anyone who posts negative reviews of a hotel, a restaurant or a doctor. Why should they fear retribution? As an example, my son worked in restaurants while in high school and college. He would tell us what waiters and chefs would do if a customer were obnoxious or too demanding. As my son always said, “why would you knowingly anger someone who handles your food?”

Yet you might have had a bad experience. But this might be a place you go to often. You don’t want to have to worry an angry chef is going to over-season your food because you complained last time. So you post an anonymous comment.

The proper thing for the post’s subject is not to sue. What should be done is reply to the post. That person can also ask those who had good experiences to post what happened to hem. Let the readers decide. It’s that’s simple.

A few days after the accident, the letters from lawyers started arriving. I think he got close to a dozen altogether. All offered to take his case so he could get “the money he deserved.” There were even a couple of phone calls from medical groups offering their services to treat his injuries.

That got me to thinking about all the solicitations I receive everyday by mail, email, and occasionally even by phone. None of them ever work with me – not even the charitable ones. It is simply waste of time and effort, I feel.

Given all of the new media outlets and other ways to effectively market I find is amazing that this kind of marketing still exists. Does anyone really hire a lawyer based on a one-page solicitation? For doctors to do it surprises me even more. Is the economy that bad that physicians actively have to recruit patients by checking accident reports? Does anyone give to a charity simply because they received a stack of return address labels?

My father-in-law, or the colonel as we call him, has a lawyer. As a retired Army officer he goes to the local Veterans Administration hospital for treatment. So he didn’t need either service. He simply filed all the solicitations in the circular file. I wonder if a cost/benefit analysis has been done on sending out those letters? It cannot be cost effective.

I say that because I don’t know anyone who has bought a product or used a service based on direct mail or email. If I need work on my house, I ask friends who they have used and what their experiences were. If I am going to stay in a hotel, I check the rating services and guest comments. When I donate to a charity, I check their Form 990s to see how much actually goes to help their cause. (If more than 10 percent goes to administration, I won’t give.) It just pays to do the homework.

This kind of pushy marketing has been going on for a long time. When I started out as a reporter 35-years-ago, I covered fatal accidents. In the small town where I started my career such news was important because usually everyone knew the victims. I can remember being in the police station reading the reports when lawyers would come in and ask to the see the same reports. I wanted information, they wanted business.

The police officers and I used to joke that some lawyers drove by accidents and threw their cards out as they went by. I never saw it personally, but nurses at the local hospital told me that some attorneys would show up in the emergency room to solicit business. Would you really hire anyone while laying on a gurney?

The people who still call to try and get my business are about a half step above those lawyers. What particularly frosts me is that we are both the state and federal do-not-call lists. The callers try to get around that by saying they are conducting a survey. The questions are so obviously geared toward getting us to buy something. I do two things then: I get the name and phone number of the company and then I hang up. I want the company information because I report them for violating the list.

The sad thing is, as I already said, there are much more effective, less intrusive ways to sell your service or product. These people just wake up and use them. I think they would be happy with the results.

When I was a newspaper reporter, there was axiom that went “never get into fight with man who buys ink by the tank car load.” The meaning was that is was almost impossible to win a fight with a newspaper because the paper’s editors controlled the means of communication. For every punch the newspaper’s opponent might throw, the newspaper could throw a 100.

Social media is assuming that position of power.. A western Massachusetts magazine editor found that out. Now social media might be a more democratic means of fighting as it can involve literally thousands people. Their only connection is the cause for which they are united. But, it doesn’t mean the punches are any softer.

The latest example of social media’s power erupted when Judith Griggs, editor of the Sunderland, Mass.– based Cook’s Source magazine, emailed a blogger that anything published on the Internet is not subject to copyright protection. The subsequent reaction from the people who use the Internet to what Griggs did, and the changes Cooks Source has made because of this brouhaha, show the power of social media.

This started when someone at Cooks Source lifted and rewrote from a food blog an article called “A Tale of Two Tarts” and published it in the magazine’s October issue. The blogger, Monica Gaudio, saw the article and asked for an apology. She also asked that a $130 donation to the Columbia School of Journalism be made.

Griggs’ replied thusly: “I have been doing this for 3 decades…I do know about copyright laws. It was ‘my bad’ indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

“But honestly, Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally.

“Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

That was a mistake on so many levels. One of primary mistake for Griggs is that Gaudio is very savvy social media user. She posted on the reply on LiveJournal. It went viral very quickly. The reaction was just as fast and it wasn’t kind.

Can you see the iceberg Griggs’ hit? Hundreds of comments were posted on the magazine’s Facebook page. They are still coming in – if you want to read them, go here.

This is how Cooks Source initially responded to the negative comments:

• “Apologies for the issues on the old page. Unfortunately there’s nothing we can do about hackers!” (My comment. This was not hacking. No one broke into the magazine’s site. This was simply people commenting on Facebook. That’s one of the central parts of social media.”
• “For those of you who wish to be negative. Please use our other group. For those who are here as readers welcome!”
• “There’s lots of people here that do not seem to understand a few basics yet they seem to all be experts in the print business.”
• “Any posts considered libelous will be removed. Thank you to Christian for his assistance on the page mechanics. We shall be temporarily adapting the wall. Apologies to our regular fans.”
• “I don’t know what some of you think you are going to achieve? We apologized, now go find a rabbit to catch or something”
• “Numerous derogatory posts have been removed and members banned and reported. Those people here to cause trouble are wasting their time. Don’t you think that jumping on a band wagon just makes you look lily-livered?”

Talk about not knowing anything about social media. Whoever wrote those posts poured gasoline on the fire. All those comments seem to have done is increase the number of anti-Cooks Source posts. As companies from United Airlines to Proctor & Gamble could tell the editors, you cannot win a fight with the Internet.

To their credit, Cooks Source now appears to be getting it. This was recently posted on their website:

“Last month an article, “American as Apple Pie — Isn’t,” was placed in error in Cooks Source, without the approval of the writer, Monica Gaudio. We sincerely wish to apologize to her for this error, it was an oversight of a small, overworked staff. We have made a donation at her request, to her chosen institution, the Columbia School of Journalism. In addition, a donation to the Western New England Food Bank, is being made in her name. It should be noted that Monica was given a clear credit for using her article within the publication, and has been paid in the way that she has requested to be paid.

“This issue has made certain changes here at Cooks Source. Starting with this month, we will now list all sources. Also we now request that all the articles and informational pieces will have been made with written consent of the writers, the book publishers and/or their agents or distributors, chefs and business owners. All submission authors and chefs and cooks will have emailed, and/or signed a release form for this material to Cooks Source and as such will have approved its final inclusion. Email submissions are considered consent, with a verbal/written follow-up.”

That’s a good apology. It shows that someone woke up to what was wrong and corrected the error. I would urge people to lay off Cooks Source now. They get it.

Of course, legally Griggs was way off base to begin with.

As Hollee Schwartz Temple, a faculty member at West Virginia University College of Law, wrote in her excellent blog: “It’s easy to copyright your work (applying a copyright symbol and date of first publication is a best practice), but if you want to sue for copyright infringement, you’ll need to register your work with the United States Copyright Office.

“It’s not OK to steal content, particularly without attribution! Images count, so be careful. (my emphasis)

“Works that have entered the “public domain” don’t qualify for copyright protection; most creative works enter the public domain because their copyrights expire.

“Not everything is subject to copyright. What’s not? Ideas, short phrases, and government works, for starters. There are also “fair use” exceptions.”

Of course, I have a feeling Griggs’ was not being malicious. She was just showing her ignorance of the law and of social media. Apparently the lesson has been learned.

At last a guy has taken the time to write this all down. Finally, the guys’ side of the story. We always hear “the rules” from the female side. Now here are the rules from the male side.

These are our rules! Please note these are all numbered “1″ ON PURPOSE!

1.   Men are NOT mind readers. FIRST & FOREMOST RULE

1. Learn to work the toilet seat. You’re a big girl. If it’s up, put it down. We need it up, you need it down. You don’t hear us complaining about you leaving it down.

1. Sunday sports, it’s like the full moon or the changing of the tides. Let it be.

1. Crying is blackmail.

1. Ask for what you want. Let us be clear on this one: Subtle hints do not work! Strong hints do not work! Obvious hints do not work! Just say it!

1. Yes and no are perfectly acceptable answers to almost every question.

1. Come to us with a problem only if you want help solving it. That’s what we do. Sympathy is what your girlfriends are for.

1. Anything we said six months ago is inadmissible in an argument. In fact, all comments become null and void after seven days.

1. If you think you’re fat, you probably are. Don’t ask us.

1. If something we said can be interpreted two ways and one of the ways makes you sad or angry, we meant the other one.

1. You can either ask us to do something or tell us how you want it done – not both. If you already know best how to do it, just do it yourself.

1. Whenever possible, please say whatever you have to say during commercials.

1. Christopher Columbus did NOT need directions and neither do we.

1. ALL men see in only 16 colors, like Windows’ default settings. Peach, for example, is a fruit, not A color. Pumpkin is also a fruit. We have no idea what mauve is.

1. If it itches, it will be scratched. We do that.

1. If we ask what is wrong and you say “nothing,” We will act like nothing’s wrong. We know you are lying, but it is just not worth the hassle.

1. If you ask a question you don’t want an answer to, expect an answer you don’t want to hear.

1. When we have to go somewhere, absolutely anything you wear is fine – really!

1. Don’t ask us what we’re thinking about unless you are prepared to discuss such topics as Football or Hockey.

1. You have enough clothes.

1. You have too many shoes.

1. I am in shape. Round IS a shape!

Thank you for reading this. Yes, I know, I have to sleep on the couch tonight; but did you know men really don’t mind that? It’s like camping.

Pass this to as many men as you can – to give them a laugh. Pass this to as many women as you can – to give them a bigger laugh.

I am not talking about a plant fire or an accident. There might be actually more time to respond to the media on one of those. Most people understand that the average executive doesn’t have time during the event to respond to questions. It is perfectly acceptable to say in such a case that the causes will be dealt with once the immediate crisis is over.

What I am talking about is an information crisis, which can often more damaging that a physical disaster. The fallout from a physical disaster can be mitigated. Unless it is dealt with right away, a consumer complaint or an even an unfounded can spread around the Internet is a matter of minutes.

Even though Mark Twain died 80 years before the rise of the Internet, he summed it up correctly when he said: “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” Actually, I think a lie can make it all the way around the world before truth gets out of bed.

Part of the problem is many companies still don’t pay attention. I am always amazed that any corporation will spend millions on advertising, but very little on reputation monitoring and management. To not keep track of company reputation is committing business suicide.

One of my firm rules of is that social media can kill you before you even know are bleeding. Someone needs to be watching 24/7. Remember that old saying that “the sun never sets on the British Empire.” That was because the English had colonies on almost every continent. Well, the Internet has a much a wider reach than the Empire ever did.

Facebook alone has over 500 million followers. Twitter is somewhere north of 100 million. If someone posts on Facebook an error your company made, and it goes viral, you could wake up in the morning to find your reputation trashed.

Look at the companies that have run into trouble because of their Internet ignorance: Proctor & Gamble’s Motrin, Comcast, United Airlines, Kryptonite Bike Locks, L’Oreal, Dell Computers, Wal-Mart, Jet Blue – the list goes on and on. (My thanks to SMI for its short history of social media screw-ups.)

Some of those companies learned their lesson and started paying attention to what as happening on the ‘Net. I am not sure others get it even after being punched around.

The only way to deal with is to be proactive. As I have also always preached, you have to be part of the conversation about your brand. It is essential. That’s why I always tell clients that they need to hear the bad comments more than the good. Good comments reinforce what you are already doing. It is valuable to know that so you can expand whatever worked.

Bad comments will tell you where you are making mistakes. That’s more important. Responding to a consumer complaint can build good will. Personally I find I like a place that is willing to own up to a mistake. It shows me they care.

Plus by doing that, a crisis is usually headed-off. If a company doesn’t respond to customer concerns and complaints, the whole thing can grow and get really ugly.

The take away from this is pay attention all time or be willing to pay the cost when you don’t.

A lot of people though flounder when it comes to creating, implementing and running a social media campaign. Many people I have dealt with seem to think that the new stuff can be done the same way as the old methods. It just ain’t so.

What is often misunderstood is that social media takes a lot more involvement from a client than the old way of doing things. I think that’s the reason a lot of CEOs and CMOs balk when presented a social media campaign proposal. Advertising doesn’t require a whole lot of work from the client. A concept is hashed out with the agency, the campaign is created with input from the client, the client approves it and then it goes live. That’s all.

Social media demands a lot more work from the client. While any good social media agency will work with the client to create a Facebook page or a Twitter campaign, it’s up to the client to use collaborate in using those and other tools.

Which brings me to an important tangent. I often run into marketing people who want to do it all at once. They want to set up a blog, start posting on Facebook, put up videos on YouTube, post pictures on Piscasa and maybe through in Twitter campaign. I never let clients do everything at once. It’s a cliché, but it’s true: you gotta crawl before you can walk, and you gotta walk before you run.

I think this is another issue CMOs and CEOs have with social media. Advertising usually happens all at once. Social media is done as a graduated approach.

I usually suggest starting with a blog and perhaps a Twitter campaign. Blogging is the hardest thing to do, but research shows it is also the most effect. Blogging is something a client should do. After all, they know their company and product best. If they cannot do it, or are unwilling, I will write articles for them. I will not do their blog. Blogs are assumed to be a personal expression of a company’s plans, outlook, and what-have-you. No one but a company person should write it.

Twitter is one of the easiest applications to do. It allows a company to start a conversation about their brand without a lot of effort. I will monitor a company’s Twitter stream to see what is being said about the brand. That’s important to do obviously.

This leads me to my second tangent. Many people in the C-Suite are not prepared for negative comments. I often have a hard time explaining that it is a good thing. When the negative comments come in, a company can identify and deal with problem areas. It is good for a company to acknowledge that it has made mistakes. It builds confidence in the company when they correct them. People like that.

See, social media is different. But it is also a lot more effective.

These actions apparently has ties to the growing field of companies that build detailed databases on people in order to track them online, the Journal reported. Using sophisticated software, these tracking companies can determine by your online behavior what movies you watch, what brand of clothes you wear, and a lot of other information you might not want others to know. Companies crave this data. They use to target sales pitches to specific consumers.

There are a lot of issues that arise from what they are doing. But to me the biggest one is the fact that they are learning far more about than they need to know. It frightens me to think what a government could do with that information. The only solution is a federal law barring the gathering and dissemination of such data.

Look, I understand that companies need to know consumer trends. It helps them produce the right amount of goods for the right markets. But that information is readily available from any retailer. Retail chains, big and small, track what sells and why. To me it would be a simple matter for those companies to sell that information to manufacturers without impinging on anyone’s privacy.

However, these companies are collecting information that is frankly none of their business. They don’t need to know whether you buy Wrangler’s or Levis. They don’t need to know which websites you visit or how long you stay there. On a personal level, they are stalking you. If you found out if a person was collecting this kind of personal information, you have them in court very quickly.

How long before a hacker breaks into one of these databases and steals all of the gathered information? This would be a gold mine for an identity thief. Not only would have they have your social security number, your passwords and your financial information. They would know all about you. They would know your likes and dislikes. At least on the Internet, they could become you completely.

Think of the potential for blackmail. Let’s say someone buys something perfectly legal from an adult website. Most people don’t that want that kind of information made public. A hacker could a person’s life hell if they found that data. Think what a politician would do with that kind of information.

Now these companies say they do not collect names or identifying information. We now know that’s not true. What else are they collecting and what’s being done with the information? There have been stories in the last couple of days about the Federal government working with cell phone companies. The government wants to make sure that changes in technology do not take away the ability to tap phones.

What’s to say that some future government administration will decide it also needs to review all of your personal information? It will be done under pretense of some great national need. Does anyone really want someone on the outside seeing how you spend your time on the net? Do you want some bureaucrat passing judgment on what you on the Internet? I thought not.

This is information should remain private. What I wish would happen is a law would be passed akin to the federal HIPPA Privacy Rule. The HIPAA Privacy Rule provides federal protections for personal health information held by covered entities and gives patients an array of rights with respect to that information, according to the Federal Department of Health and Human Services’ website.

The Privacy Rule, a Federal law, gives you rights over your health information and sets rules and limits on who can look at and receive your health information, the HHS website says.

That kind of law is the only thing that will keep our information private. Remember what Ben Franklin said: “those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”

To me, Martin shows that he doesn’t understand social media when it calls “little more than the newest channel on the block.” Social media is not a channel; it is a whole new way of doing things. I think that’s the problem because advertising people such as Martin don’t understand that.

I could fill this blog with examples of how social media has supplanted and surpassed advertising as the premier method of marketing. Just look at the companies whose primary marketing efforts are through social media: the shoe company Zappos, Southwest Airlines, Amazon, Pepsi and a host of others.

For advertising people, social media is a just another way to talk to consumers. It is not. It is a way for brands to talk with their consumers. As I always tell clients, there is a conversation going on about your brand. You should be part of that conversation, but it is going to happen whether you are in it or not. Advertising agencies think they can control that conversation. They cannot. It can be directed, but it cannot be controlled.

Martin argues “social media is the creation of stories, content, photos, videos, information and entertainment.” He says that it is difficult to create strategically sound, effective content. The people that can do that, he says, work for advertising agencies. I have to disagree. The average advertising agency employee is not equipped in either training or temperament to create the kind of things social media demands. They are used to writing six lines of punchy copy. They are not used to making a coherent argument for why one brand should be purchased.

There are numerous studies that show most people don’t believe traditional advertising. If people wanted to view advertisements, they would ask DVR manufacturers to program the devices do they didn’t skip commercials. Every time I talk to some who has just purchased a DVR, one of the things they rave about not having to watch commercials anymore.

A recent Harris poll found some interesting facts about television commercials. The study, as reported by the Center for Media Research, said that 75 percent of Americans have found a commercial on TV confusing. Twenty-one percent often find TV commercials confusing, while 55 percent say that commercials are not very often confusing. Just 14 percent say they never find TV commercials confusing,. Eleven percent do not watch TV commercials.

So, this is a situation where a third of the audience either is confused by commercials or never watches them. Only 14 percent are never confused by a commercial. That means that the message is getting through to the audience must of the time. Not a ringing endorsement of advertising.

“A commercial’s main focus needs to be selling a product or service,” the Center for Media Research reports that the study’s author says. “If consumers watching these commercials are unsure of that main focus, the marketers are doing something wrong. If the ad is confusing, the prospective consumer may dismiss that product from consideration.”

I don’t think I want the people who are not getting the message across to handle my social media.

Public relations people are the ones who understand how to create the kind of campaign that social media demands. PR practitioners know how to use pull marketing, which is the definition of social media.

Speaking as one who has spent approximately a decade in public relations, I can tell you we understand that we have to talk with consumers, not at them. Prior to switching into public relations, I was a working reporter for over two decades. You learn fast in journalism you cannot make people read any story just because you think it is important. You have to give them reasons to do so.

I also always tell clients that consumers control their brand. Social media acknowledges that and uses it to the client’s advantage. Today’s consumers hate being pandered to or coerced. That’s what advertising tries to do. Social media on the other hand gives people reasons to buy a product, but realizes the final decision is up to them.

That goes back to public relations. Traditional public relations is all about creating content that people want to read. A public relations person has to convince a reporter to do a story, or attend an event. Public relations people are used to creating content that people want to read. The idea is to make the consumer want to engage with the brand.

It is not that much of leap from public relations to social media. The tools are different, but the idea is the same. Public relations is where social media should reside.

I was really saddened to read about the suicide of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi. Reading the stories about how the gay student was harassed by two other students, I was struck by how social media played a part in what happened. It also struck me how social media seems to have in this case broken down the wrong boundaries.

Every time something as all encompassing as social media comes along, a lot of boundaries are broken down. That’s a good thing usually. However this is case, I think the tsunami that is social media destroyed some boundaries that need to be reestablished.

I was a member of a high school class that liked to have a good time. We partied a lot on the weekends. However, we always very careful about publicizing the party’s location. It was strictly word-of-mouth. Notice of the party was always kept from adults. Locations were on a need-to-know basis.

Once at the party, there was another strict rule – we always ensured there was no permanent record of the event. Cameras were never allowed. No one wanted pictures of Saturday night’s revelry to show up on a parent’s, teachers, or coach’s desk. The boundaries were rigid and we knew exactly where they were.

We also respected each other’s personal space. If a couple wanted to go off by themselves, no one followed them to see what was up. If someone wanted to indulge in an illegal substance, they usually went off somewhere private with others of a like mind. They certainly didn’t take pictures of it and put them out in the public.

Those boundaries seem to have broken down. I am amazed sometimes by how many of today’s social media users seem to have no filter when it comes to posting things. In Clementi’s case, prosecutors have charged Molly Wei, of Princeton, and fellow Rutgers freshman Dharun Ravi of Plainsboro, both 18, allegedly used a webcam to broadcast the encounter on the Internet between Ravi’s roommate Clementi and a man who hasn’t been identified.

The tragic result of that is Clementi committed suicide. I don’t think anyone knows all the facts, but clearly he wasn’t ready for the world to know about his sexuality. The boundaries around what he thought were his private life had been blown up.

While this is an extreme example of that lack of boundaries, there are so many others. Look at the number of teenagers who attack someone, film it, and post it on YouTube. A lot of vandals seem to delight in recording their antics and then telling the world about it on Facebook. I know of companies who have decided not to hire someone because they posted pictures online of themselves drunk or naked or both. Then there’s sexting, another thing I don’t understand.

I realize a lot of this behavior went on before social media. I am not blaming social media per se for what is happening. Social media is just a tool. There have always been exhibitionists. Most teenagers are not equipped to look a couple of years down the road. I am really glad there is no record of some of the things I did 40 years ago.

The difference now is that it possible to tell the 1.9 billion Internet users exactly how you screwed up. Plus, once something is on the Internet, it is forever. As I said, social media is a tool. The issue people a lot of people are misusing this tool.

I don’t know the answer. All I know is we have to find a way to reestablish those boundaries.

By now it should be clear that any company that wants to have a successful marketing campaign has to use social media in its mix. Other have said, and I agree, that social media is the 21^st century’s industrial revolution. Leaving other forms of marketing out of a campaign will usually not affect its success. Leaving social media out can cripple a campaign before it begins.

Not just any person or agency can create and run a social media campaign. It takes an experienced marketing person who has both the training and experience in using social media. Too often companies stumble because they try to take shortcuts.

Many companies do seem to realize they need social media. The people in charge see their competitors are successfully using social media, so they decide to jump into the game. But social media is still pretty new. That leads to a lot of uncertainty among chief marketing officers. They look at the social media toolbox that’s filled with dozens of sites and are confused.

When that happens companies do one of two things: The CMO hires someone fresh out of college 22-year-old who must know they what are doing because they have a Facebook page and they tweet; or they turn to their advertising or marketing agency and ask them to put together a social media campaign.

The problems with the two approaches should be obvious. In the first case, a 22-year-old may know how to “like” on Facebook, but won’t have any idea on to plan and run a campaign. In the second case, a company will often find their agency has hired a 22-year-old fresh out of college to do social media for clients. In some cases, I know of old-line agencies have tired to talk their clients out of using social media arguing that traditional media will work just fine. I think that’s because they don’t want to admit they don’t know how to create and run a social media campaign.

I have noticed lately is there are many companies offering for-fee webinars, high-priced conferences, and expensive books. These companies all purport be social media experts. But as far as I can tell, none of these actually have done any social media campaigns. Who trained their trainers? What’s their background? That’s why I am always suspicious of those offers.

What of course a company should do is hire an experienced social media agency. That agency should be experienced in both social media and traditional marketing and public relations. Why traditional public relations? Because social media marketing and traditional public relations meld quite nicely. While it is important to use the new channels, you cannot afford to ignore the old ones.

So, when a company decides to do the right thing and hire a social media marketing agency, what skills and abilities should those making the decisions look for? Here are my suggestions for what should be asked:

• What is the agency’s experience in social media? How long has it been doing social media marketing?
• Who will be working on the campaign? An experienced account executive who has extensive training in social media and its uses or that recent college grad with the Facebook page?
• What social media applications does it use for its own business? Does it have a Facebook page, does it use Twitter, do its principals blog, does it post videos on YouTube, and does it know what social bookmarking is? There are many other questions that should be asked. This is just a sample.
• How many social media campaigns has the agency done? What were the results?
• What will the client be expected to do? This is a key question. Social media demands client involvement to a much larger extent than other forms of marketing. It is one of the things that makes it more effective.
• How does the agency measure ROI on the social media campaign?
• How will the agency integrate traditional public relations methods with the social media efforts? This is an area where a lot of social media agencies stumble. While social media is taking over rapidly, there is an important segment of the audiences who still read newspapers, watch television and listen to the radio. Don’t ignore those people. Many of them occupy the C-suite. Remember to a lot of CEOs the apex of public relations success is seeing their name on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. This is an important group to keep happy.

There are a lot of other questions that should be asked. But those should get your started.

Facebook is doing the same thing, although in a much less violent way obviously. The difference between the Borg and Facebook is that people want to join Facebook. It is remaking the way we interact with our fellow human beings. It has become the key site for any advertiser or marketing company that wants to build or extend a brand.

(Note to Trek Fans: I do not want to hear from you about the nuances of the series. I don’t care.)

I was reminded of the other day when I received the latest numbers on Facebook’s penetration of the wired world. Facebook now has 512 million followers in 212 countries, according to the Sept. 22 issue of World Internet Stats News. The News says that as of Aug. 31, there were approximately 1.9 billion Internet users on Earth. If you want to read the entire report, go here.

What makes Facebook’s assimilation of the Internet even more amazing is that the estimated 420 million Internet users in China cannot access the social media site. It has been banned in China since 2009.

So, the Earth’s estimated population is an estimated 6.84 billion people. Facebook is reaching just about 10 percent of it. There is nothing else in the world that reaches that many people on a continuous basis – with one exception. The World Cup soccer championship reaches over 700 million people during its run. But that only happens once every four years.

I think Internet Stats Editor Enrique De Argaez puts its best: “Mark Zuckerberg, without being a political leader and without planning to do so, has sparked the only true revolution taking place today in the world: the — Social Web Revolution –. The main characteristic of a revolution is a drastic and far-reaching change in ways of thinking and behaving. This is precisely what has happened worldwide in the Internet due to his now famous Facebook network. More than 517 million persons in 212 different countries have joined the Facebook Social Web, in the surprisingly short period of time of six years.”

Argaez is the chief executive officer of the Bogota, Columbia-based Miniwatts Marketing Group.

Keep in mind that Zuckerberg just turned 26-years-old. If you want to know more about him, read this article from the New Yorker. I suspect it is more objective than the movie “Social Network” about Facebook that is scheduled to be released Oct. 1.

What Zuckerberg and company have done is create and grow the dominant social media application. Facebook has become the must place to be for social media marketing.

“The company has developed a potentially powerful kind of advertising that’s more personal—more “social,” in Facebook’s parlance—than anything that’s come before, Bloomberg Business Week reporter Brad Stone wrote in the magazine’s Sept. 22 issue. “Ads on the site sit on the far right of the page and are such a visual afterthought that most users never click them. These ads can evolve, though, from useless little billboards into content, migrating into casual conversations between friends, colleagues, and family members—exactly where advertisers have always sought to be.”

As Stone points out in his article, Facebook has nailed the essence of social media marketing: “Facebook’s promise to advertisers isn’t to get consumers to buy their products—or really even to get them to click through to their website. Instead, it wants to subtly park the advertiser’s brand in the user’s consciousness and provoke a purchase down the line. More immediately, it also aims to get you to ‘like’ the brand yourself, which then serves as a sort of all-purpose opt-in, allowing the advertiser to insert future messages into your feed.”

That’s the real key to social media. It is why I now tell my clients Facebook is where they need to be. They should use other sites, but without using Facebook, it is like trying paddle kayak with a spoon. It just makes sense.

You can follow me on Facebook at Jeffrey Cole.

My dog, Chester the Wonder Dog, is an alpha male. According to the online magazine Dog Owners Guide, an alpha dog is the leader of the pack, “the dog that dominates and leads the other members of the pack. The alpha is the boss that makes decisions for the entire pack.”

The same kind of “alpha dogs” exist in social media. They are the leaders of the pack, the first adapters, the ones who influence where everyone else goes on the net.

I discovered Chester was a leader the first time I took him to the dog park. Other dogs were coming up and sniffing him as he sat there. Some actually lay down in front of him. He would give each a very brief sniff and then somehow send them on their way. When Chester wandered around checking out various things, the other dogs followed and checked out the same areas.

I asked our vet why Chester wasn’t that interested in other dogs’ scents. The animal doctor explained that as an alpha dog, Chester didn’t care what the other canines smelled like. It was more important to Chester – and to the other dogs – that they knew what he smelled like. In that way they could follow his lead.

Social media “alpha dogs” act somewhat the same way. They are the first ones to “wander” around social media sites, picking out the best ones. They are the ones that post about the best restaurants, the hottest clubs, the best movies and everything else.

I am lucky enough to know some of them – Sarah Evans and Jason Kintzler are two who I greatly admire. Both have carved unique niches that I check out daily. I often follow their leads.

How do you identify those leaders? Look for the people who are on Facebook who make recommendations first. Check their blogs; follow them on Twitter and YouTube. They will always be at the front of the pack, telling others what’s cool and what’s not.

This brings me to my second point. Marketers have to find these people. You want to sell a product today; you need to build some social media cred. The best way to build cred is to find these leaders, these alpha dogs, and bring your idea or product to their attention.

However, you cannot pitch them. Going back to Chester the Wonder Dog, he rarely takes any interest in any toy I just give to him. I have to give him a reason to latch on to it – it is filled with treats, I will let him chew on it or it does something that interests him. He particularly likes to pay tug-of-war, if I take the time to wave the rubber rings in front of him. I have to be patient. He will play when he is good and ready.

I also know enough not to try to give anything he doesn’t like. For instance, he hates squeaky toys. We found early on that he would immediately destroy any toy that made noise.

The same rules apply to those media leaders. You cannot pitch them directly. It won’t work. You have to entice them, give them reasons to take an interest in your product. If there is something they don’t like, they will ignore it. If continue to try and get them accept your idea, they will tear it apart by telling others not to use the product.

There are no guarantees though. Alpha dogs make their own decisions. They will decide on their own what route they and the pack will want to take.

Blogger’s note: One of the keys to a successful home repair is knowing your limitations.

Because I do most of my own home repair I did not have the name of reliable plumber. So how did I find someone who I knew was skilled and trustworthy? Google? An online directory? Online reviews?

Nope, Nyet, Nein.

I called some friends who I knew had recently had plumbing work done on their houses. I asked them what company they’d used and what their experience was. After a few phone calls, I settled on which company I was going to use and called them up.

What I availed myself of was the most basic, and probably oldest, form of marketing – word-of-mouth. I have a feeling when Oog wanted to trade for a snazzy fur for Mrs. Oog, he asked around the cave to find out who had the best pelts.

Remember, social media is just word-of-mouth writ large. Instead of talking to a few of your friends, you can now broadcast your opinions all over the Internet. Others can read them and make a decision.

That brings me to another point about word-of-mouth; the issue of trust. I called people who like me who know something about plumbing. I knew their opinions were of a value because they could evaluate the quality of work.

There’s one of the problem with social media – it is often hard to decide who to trust. There have been several instances of individuals creating false identities to tout their own companies or products. Obviously they are not providing an objective opinion.

So the key to is identify those people who are objective and honest. It is the same thing as talking to your friends about a store or a company. You soon learn who knows what they are talking about and can be trusted. Read enough on-line reviews and you’ll know who to believe.

Which brings to why marketers should care about this.

I grew up in a very small town in the Adirondack Mountains in northern New York State. My father was one of a small group of community leaders. Anyone wanting to do something in our village would usually run it by this group. These were the men – in the was early ‘60s, so they were all men – who could convince the rest of the community to go along with a project.

Those groups still exist. They have just moved on line. They are called influencers or early adopters now, but their role is the same as those men who sat around our kitchen table drinking coffee. Convince these people that your product is something worth buying and have your race is run. They will tell others who will tell still others, etc.

One advantage that these people provide is they are often looking for new things. You just have to dangle the bait for them to bite. It is how I found a good plumber.

Some Internet Service Providers (ISPs) want to create a two-tiered web. According to Wikipedia “neutrality proponents claim that telecom companies seek to impose a tiered service model in order to control the pipeline and thereby remove competition, create artificial scarcity, and oblige subscribers to buy their otherwise uncompetitive services. Many believe net neutrality to be primarily important as a preservation of current freedoms. Vinton Cerf, considered a ‘father of the Internet’ and co-inventor of the Internet Protocol, Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the Web, and many others have spoken out in favor of network neutrality.”

Wikipedia goes on to define net neutrality as follows: “Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.” Ian Paul wrote in the online edition of PC World that “Network neutrality is the principle that broadband providers should not be allowed to discriminate or restrict Web traffic based on its content.”

The bottom of those advocating net neutrality is that the Internet should remain like it is currently. Open access and no restrictions whether you are paying $10 a month for your access or $100 a month.

Paul goes on to note that what ISPs are asking for is the right to maintain a so-called private Internet to provide new services. Some examples of what private broadband services could be include health care monitoring, educational services, gaming and other forms of entertainment. This private service would be separate from the regular Internet.

What that means in practice, at least to me, is that some people are going to find that they cannot afford the new services. And that ain’t right.

Think about this from a social media point-of-view. A lot of social media involves video. What happens to a small company who finds that video is the best way to get out their message? Videos take a lot of bandwidth. A lot of ISPS don’t like video because its bandwidth demands. There are discussions about charging more for sending large files. Could a new company afford to market itself with a higher priced web?

One of the great things about the Internet is how it has given people who have never had a voice before a chance to say something. Think of all the governments that have been overthrown because people had ways outside of official channels to communicate. Look how people in this country has used the ‘Net to make themselves heard.

Or it could be as simple as finding out it will cost you more to download music because of the amount of bandwidth it takes. Online gamers might find themselves paying more to access such things as World of Warcraft.

What is particularly scary to me is how wireless access is being left out of the discussion. Earlier this month Google and Verizon released a proposal to maintain an open Internet while creating room for a broadband network of premium services. (my emphasis.) It left wireless out of the verbiage.

Doesn’t seem like that big of a deal. Morgan Stanley analysts predict that in five years more people will be going line via wireless access (smart phones) than computers. As the New York Times reported, as ISPs earn more revenue from private services, “they might have less incentive to invest in Internet capacity, pushing more content providers to these special services and creating alternative networks that look similar to cable TV.” And cutting many people out of the best parts of the Internet.

This scares me. It should scare you too.

It’s high time that a C-level individual engaged in social media, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value. So here you go. I’ve done the work for you. What follows is an “Executive Summary” of my findings.

Social Media Value #1:  Unfiltered Feedback

As you already know, some of the scarcest (rarest) yet most valuable information a CEO can obtain is honest, unfiltered feedback. Think about it. You interact all day with managers, employees, and handlers working to keep the boss happy and therefore keep their job. Sure, being surrounded by “Yes men” can be more comfortable, but it can also insulate you from the stark realities of your business. If done correctly, social media enables CEO’s to hear raw, candid feedback from real people – people who aren’t afraid of being fired because they CAN’T be fired. The truth is, leaders with their ego in check are already fully aware that they work for the customer – the customer is his boss – so if the customer doesn’t like dropped calls on their iPhone or the sauce on their Domino’s pizza, it’s their job to make it better.

Now, every customer is not always right (or wrong), but if 850 out of 1000 user comments say tthe new Sketcher’s Sport shoe caused them to sprain their ankle, then something needs to be fixed – and fast! CoolCleveland’s Founder Thomas Mulready is a perfect example of a CEO with this customer orientation. After emailing out his weekly eMagazine for 7 years, he decided that it needed to be updated, and set about introducing a new format with much fanfare. In doing so, he also did something revolutionary – he asked all 90,000 of his readers for feedback on what they thought of the new style – and boy did they reply with scores of comments submitted over the span of a few days. But then he did something else revolutionary – he actually listened, modifying and improving the new site to reflect reader tastes and preferences. Yes, it takes humility (“Who are these people to give me feedback?  I invented this product! Don’t they know they can just click the links?) but the end result is an engaged audience who now feel genuinely empowered to provide even more feedback, emboldened by the knowledge that their comments actually impact (and can improve) the end product.

Social Media Value #2:  Authenticity

Hand-in-hand with the unfiltered feedback above is the ability to leverage social media to authentically communicate with your employees, partners, customers (and non-customers), investors, and media, directly engaging all of your brand ambassadors efficiently and economically. Rather than layers of staff, spokespeople, and sterile press releases, social media now offers an elegant and effective medium for disseminating information either “straight from the heart” or “straight from the horses’ mouth” depending on your preferred idiom. Dan Gilbert’s recent LeBron James “rant” would qualify as both, capturing the owners’ anger, frustration, and competitive resolve just moments after James’ announced his departure. As you’ve probably noticed, nobody can tell the company story and embody the company brand like the CEO (think Steve Jobs) and by offering the ability to immediately and directly engage stakeholders – whether on a typical day, during a product launch, and/or especially during a time of crisis – social media provides an invaluable medium for maximizing brand value and minimizing potential brand degradation. Social media helps firms “keep it real” but couches it in a positive brand-reinforcing context.

Social Media Value #3: Six Sigma (Low Cost)

In case you were wondering, executives LOVE things like Six Sigma because:

1. It reminds us of our Greek fraternity days in college.

2. The other soccer dad’s don’t understand Value Stream Mapping.

3. Six Sigma and lean processes are all about speed and cost sacvings, two of our favorite topics.

By its very architecture, social media is positioned to leverage firms’ Six Sigma orientation by expediting interactions, exchanges, customer service, feedback loops, product launches, marketing, and advertising, and enabling it at a fraction of the cost of traditional media, to a much more targeted audience, and in a far more nuanced and contextual value exchange. Social media options allow your message distribution format to evolve from shotgun to sniper, from billboard to message board, and from broadcast to narrowcast.  Plus, it takes your marketing posture from a one-way, blanketing, bullhorn approach to a more intimate, just-in-time interaction; offering the opportunity for a more detailed, valuable and more profitable conversation and connection with your audience (and you don’t need a Black Belt to do it).

Social Media Value #4:  Balancing Transparency AND Privacy

The only thing worse than not using social media tools is using them in the wrong way. Your firm could very easily invest time and money on social media, and then end up spending even more time and money doing damage control because you did it wrong the first time – talk about a lose-lose situation. With social media, there’s a “right way” and a “wrong way” to do things – so if you’re going to do it, do it right. Remember, anywhere-anytime-anyone social media channels must be handled as the “nuclear options” that they are, with the capability to destroy your brand value in a single Twitter, email, or YouTube video that goes viral.

With great power comes great responsibility, and a healthy respect for the global reach and impact of social media must emanate directly from the CEO, who knows better than anyone that the same programs allowing firms to connect and influence the marketplace can also be turned against you to alienate them. And just as social media can provide the market with a transparent window into the soul of your company, it can also showcase you at your worst, doing more harm than good.  Let’s face it, your firm is already dabbling in social media as it is – so you might as well manage your risk and liability by codifying corporate expectations, establishing specific ground rules, and educating your stakeholders regarding proper use of these seemingly innocent yet powerful tools.

Social Media Value #5: Supporting Statistics

Executives rely on market research to support and substantiate any designated course of action, and devour facts, stats, and data-points like shrimp at a wedding reception. Summarized below are a few statistics buttressing the explosion of this social media trend, and detailing how Corporate America is leveraging it to realize significant revenue and market share growth going forward.

• In the last 7 years, Internet usage has increased 70 percent a year. Spending for digital advertising this year will be more than $25 billion and surpass print advertising spending (forever)

• Lenovo has experienced a 20 percent reduction in activity to their call center since they launched their community website for customers
• Blendtec quintupled sales with its “Will it Blend” series on YouTube
• Only 18 percent of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
• Naked Pizza set a one-day sales record using social media: 68 percent of their sales and 85 percent of their new customers came via Twitter.
• Software company Genius.com reports 24 percent of social media leads convert to sales opportunities,
• Dell has already made over $7 million in sales via Twitter.
• Thirty-seven percent of Generation Y heard about the Ford Fiesta via social media before its launch in the US and currently 25 percent of Ford’s marketing budget is spent on digital/social media.
• Seventy-one percent of companies plan to increase investments in social media by an average of 40 percent.
• A recent Wetpaint/Altimeter Group study found companies that widely engage in social media surpass their peers in both revenue and profit.

(Sources for Statistics: meyersreport.com, lenovosocial.com, George Wright, Blendtec, Mashable.com, econsultancy.com, businessweek.com )

Getting Your Board On Board

Lest we forget, even the Boss has a Boss – they’re called the Board of Directors – and these are the people that recruit and hire CEO’s for the purpose of serving as a charismatic and visionary leader of their organization. And so I urge you, don’t disappoint them when it comes to leveraging social media within your organization. The “Bang for the Buck” value proposition is too compelling to ignore, and the fact is – your competitors are already entering this arena and establishing new service baseline norms and minimum threshold expectations – so standing still amounts to losing ground and therefore is not an option. What you need is a plan.

Do I still hate social media?  No, but I’m only going to embrace it on the “executive terms” that have served me so well to this point in my career and they are, “If you’re going to do something, go all in and do it right.”  From now on, all social media, social marketing, and social networking will be discussed in the context – not of a campaign (which starts and ends) – but as part of an ongoing, strategic, and systematic dialog with our stakeholders and marketplace.

Executives have the focus and vision to road map strategies playing out three, five, and 10 years into the future. But, we’re also “plodders” and are comfortable with short, measured, consistent steps – day in and day out – as long as we know that they are aligned with reaching a desired goal. When we discuss your social media strategy, the focus will be on consistency and sustainability over the long haul. Remember, executives don’t have the ego needs, risk profiles, or the time to be on the bleeding edge, or even the cutting edge. We just want it to work.

I can confidently predict that every month for the next 100 years there will be a new “Must Have” application, portal or community that one of your employees will discover, and then try to convince you that your company will implode if you don’t immediately join, link, or Retweet. In five years, all but three of these ideas will probably be forgotten.  During our meeting, we will discuss how to frame out an enterprise-wide social media strategy, predicated on the foundation of proven tools and that have stood the test of time and offer “Best-In-Class” results, so that you will be empowered to handle these conversations proactively in the context of a larger road map, rather than reacting to these weekly ambushes in a dismissive defensive way. Remember, our goal for social media is not a lark, but a lifestyle and work-shopping a strategy which builds on stable, scalable tools, yet also affords the flexibility to address unprecedented “Black Swan” technology developments, provides you with a welcome buffer from being whipsawed by a weekly website.  Between the two of us, we’ll finally take that reliable “80/20 Rule” and apply it to social media, and then spend time focusing on the 80 percent of stakeholder value that can be extracted with 20% of the effort (while knowingly and purposefully ignoring the remaining 20 percent of value which takes up 80 percent of the effort).

The Bottom Line

In the Forward of Geoffrey Moore’s bestseller “Crossing the Chasm” Regis McKenna writes:

“Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationships. Customers don’t like to be ‘owned’ if that implies lack of choice or freedom. But they do like to be ‘owned’ if what that means is a vendor taking ongoing responsibility for the success of their joint ventures.  Ownership in this sense means an abiding commitment and a strong sense of mutuality in the development of the marketplace. When customers encounter this kind of ownership, they tend to become fanatically loyal to their supplier, which in turns builds a stable economic base for profitability and growth.”

While there will always be a “me” in media – social media, social marketing, and social networking tools were designed to work best as a conduit for enabling information exchange, establishing a dialog, and creating a two-way conversation with your audience. At the end of the day, social media is simply about creating and maintaining relationships – and even and executive can do that.

I’m an executive and I hate social media. There, I said it. It’s finally “out there.” But before you Twitter a flaming flash mob link to assemble pitchfork-wielding Second Life villagers outside my door, I urge you to take a deep breath, put down your double frappuccino, remove your earpiece, step away from your iPad, and set your iPhasers to stun, for I come in peace.  If you’ve ever wondered why your CEO also hates social media, social networking and, well, socializing in general, I urge you to continue reading.

Just as Fox TV’s Masked Magician series demystified the tricks of the world’s most famous illusionists, I offer the following as both a behind-the-scenes peak and a confessional of sorts, into the mind of the executive. For to truly understand the conflicting yet predictable stonewalling in this domain, one must search deep below the surface, plumbing the depths of the executive psyche, motivations, and worldviews, for only then will you be able to “crack the code,” engage us in our native tongue and communicate in a vocabulary and language to which we will respond.  Consider this your own personal backstage pass to the inner sanctum of the Executive Suite.

Executive: More Perception Than Position

For starters, the term “executive” isn’t a title as much as it is a mindset or a set of attributes – often leading to career success and the achievement of such rank – but what might surprise most is that this ambition and executive mentality often begins to manifest itself early in life.  For example, while most were partying and hanging out in high school, we were already taking college-level classes while holding down several part time jobs.  And when most were “finding themselves” in college and still deciding on a major after three years, we were serving in student leadership, doing internships, or doubling up on classes to finish college a semester early. And when most were finally in the workforce, instead of clubbing and playing in multiple softball leagues, we were completing an advanced degree in night school, pursuing professional certifications, and framing out retirement plans.

Executives are high achievers – that’s just how we’re wired. Give me a mountain and I’ll climb it. And if you don’t have a mountain, I’ll find my own mountain and I’ll climb it.  And if I can’t find a mountain, I’ll build one – just so I can climb it. But here’s what most people don’t get about executives. Once a CEO climbs a mountain, he doesn’t feel the need to Tweet to the world that he did it. He doesn’t have the natural desire to blog, “Look what a great climber I am” and include multiple pictures with links to his Facebook and LinkedIn account. He did it because it’s in his DNA. He doesn’t require the attention, approval, or applause of others, and therein lies the fundamental source of the problem – executives are non-narcissistic in a YouTube world. We’re outliers. In a society that brags, blogs, and Tweets about the tiniest personal minutia, we could care less because, frankly, we expect success, it’s normal to us. It’s like Vince Lombardi’s admonition to his running back after an overly exuberant display, “Next time you make a touchdown, act like you’ve been there before.”

Eagles Don’t Flock

Executives are “eagles,” and unlike seagulls, eagles don’t flock. We’re not joiners and we’re not groupies, which is why we overwhelmingly prefer challenging single-person sports like running, cycling, weightlifting, and our one concession to “group sports” – golf (which is still technically a single-person sport, but more fun in groups). Lance Armstrong didn’t win his titles without leaving the peloton,and ditto for greats like Sampras, Tiger, and Arnold. They had to go above and beyond the group to achieve greatness, and for this reason it truly us lonely at the top (not that we mind).

Social Networking: The Problem is “Networking”

The reason we hate social networking is the same reason we hate regular networking. Exchanging small talk for two hours in a room full of strangers, with a drink in one hand and a business card in the other, and a “Hi, I’m Doug” name tag peeling off my lapel, and standing – my goodness the standing – and looking unsuccessfully for any food with some protein in it, and wondering if this guy with the too-firm handshake is going to see if we can “LinkIn” after sharing an elevator ride, before glancing at my watch and counting the minutes until I can leave and get back to work. It’s a nightmare. Why? Because – surprise, surprise – most executives are actually introverts, who value their time and their privacy and are constantly evaluating the ROI trade-offs of every hour of every day. (Quiz:  How many times have you heard a CEO describe himself as a “People Person”?)

To say that we are anti-social would be a huge misrepresentation, but when you combine the word “social” with “networking” – let’s just say it sends shivers up my spine. Do I like the company of others? Sure I do – but I want the time to be well spent. Instead of random, shallow, unfocused small talk, CEO’s would much rather sit around with a small group of peers for 2 hours and discuss BIG specific challenges – and their solutions. In fact, the reason so much business gets done on the golf course is because it’s one of the few places leaders actually congregate and feel relaxed enough to discuss what’s really on their minds.

Social Networking: The Problem is “Social”

The next hurdle for executives with social networking are the implications of the root word “Social”, and, by its very spelling, its association to Socialism. Socialism is defined as, “Any system of social organization in which the means of producing and distributing goods is owned collectively,” and further, “An economic and political theory based on public ownership or common ownership and cooperative management of the means of production and allocation of resources.” (At least that’s what someone wrote on Wikipedia). The premise and value of the “social media” movement is the power of the collective in the production, distribution, and ownership of goods, and the reason executives resist this model is that it flies in the face of their existing worldview which, quite frankly, has been pretty successful to date. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Most of us have a pretty big chip on our shoulders, attributing our career success to the years of diligence, education, ambition, delayed gratification and sacrifices we’ve made to reach the leadership levels we’ve achieved.

Therefore, the anti-capitalistic notion that my work and contributions would be homogenized with the uninspired masses, and that ultimately my value would be determined by the randomness of the collective is a jarring and unpalatable departure. I want to control my company! I want to control my brand! I want to determine my destiny! It’s too important to leave it to chance (or simply be outvoted by the uninformed bourgeois)! Unfortunately and tragically for us executives, the beauty and power of social media is only fully unleashed when we let it go, and that, my friends, is the hardest thing for us to do (…and also explains why we hate checking luggage at the airport).

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

Okay, I promised that this would be a confessional, so here’s a shocker. Over time, there is a tendency for CEO’s to get inflated egos.  Now granted, a healthy ego can serve as a necessary defense mechanism to provide protection from the relentless attacks from subordinates, peers, and the media, but too much amounts to just plain pride. We like to think of ourselves as a pretty smart bunch, and our position is such that even if we don’t completely understand something, we often project to our colleagues that we do.

A classic example of this phenomenon transpired during the Enron debacle, where ranks of senior executives refused to admit that they couldn’t comprehend the mechanics of this powerful conglomerate, until it was too late. It’s the same with new advances in technology, which has accelerated during our careers from “hit or miss” to “mission critical,” going from bricks to clicks and from mortar to mind share, while serving as a platform for everything from infrastructure, billing, and product development, to security, scheduling, and sales. The rapid rate of change in digital innovation has caused CEOs to feel extremely vulnerable around technology because it is something on which we have become very reliant, but which we understand and “control” so little, and this vulnerability leads to fear, and this fear to irrational decisions and suboptimal outcomes. When CEOs don’t have the confidence in their staff to delegate, or lack the humility to admit their ignorance regarding technology advances, they get defensive and act out in fear – or fail to act altogether.

Social Media: Justified Fear?

Executives justify their fear of social media by pointing back to a historic drumbeat of disappointment and unfulfilled promises. They recall with vivid detail the never-ending parade of new online engagement vehicles and “paradigms” introduced over the past 15 years by turtleneck-wearing gurus with names like Kip or Seth, which were then propagated by self-proclaimed “New Economy” experts sporting titles like “Chief Innovation Officer” and “Director of Chaos,” and then championed by side burn-wearing hipster foot soldiers who never met a filter they didn’t like. In the 90’s, we were promised that customers would beat a path to our door if we created something called a “web page” and then “posted” it on this thing called the Internet or World Wide Web or something. Then they convinced us to buy electronic lists and send out “Email Blasts” to our target markets, and next it was a website redesign, push technology, pull technology, exchanged links, partner intranets, eBusiness, eCommerce, blogging, webinars, podcasts, search engine optimization, YouTube videos, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, yada, yada, yada. Each time they promised that this time it would be different, and that this new product/protocol/portal/potion would somehow (magically??) drive revenue, increase efficiency, and optimize utilization (or some other buzz word or invented metric). You told me to blog, so I blogged. You told me to Twitter, so I Tweeted. What’s it going to be tomorrow – scan my body into a mashup simulator to create a hologram so I can telepresence myself into sales calls in Madrid via FourSquare using Flickr? All I know is that I’ve spent a lot of time and money on a series of disjointed initiatives and campaigns and so far none have performed as advertised.

Don’t Feed Me Another Fad

Look, executives aren’t that complicated. While I can handle the many nuanced “gray areas” of business leadership, I prefer to see things in black and white; victories and defeats; profits and losses. I don’t mind making significant, strategic multi-year investments and committing to enterprise-wide initiatives which will improve the future performance of my company – in fact, I ENJOY it – what do you think got me to the Executive Suite in the first place? Just don’t insult me. I don’t want to waste any more time or money on the hype of  “the next big thing” or the newest tool or toy, only to be disappointed when the latest flash-in-the-pan fad fades and goes the way of Harvard Graphics. It’s not that I have a fear of commitment – frankly, it’s just the opposite. I have a healthy fear and distaste for doing things randomly just to be doing something; or because someone saw an article in USA Today, or CNBC did a story on it, or out of fear that I’ll be the last one in my circle to “get on board.” (Believe me, the things that keep me up at night can’t be solved in 140 characters or less). The truth is, I would love to commit to social media in a significant way, but so far nobody in my organization has stepped forward with a cerebral, strategic, multi-generational, integrated, systematic, and sustainable methodology and road map for synergistically capitalizing on this medium over the long haul.

Your Network is Your Net Worth

Executives are uniquely conflicted because we know better than anyone the power of relationships, and the truth of the old axiom, “Your network is your net worth,” yet we are inherently introverts, and gravitate towards solitude versus socializing. We understand on an intellectual level that none of us individually are “too big to fail,” and that even the Lone Ranger had Tonto and Batman had Robin, yet we find initiating conversations and exchanges with others to be draining, distracting, and exhausting rather than invigorating and inspiring. Hence we yearn; as a group we pine; for deep within our heart of hearts burns a great bright hope that somehow and in some way this social media movement or platform or culture or whatever could be harnessed and leveraged to cross that chasm and create valuable, authentic exchanges and relevant, real-time dialogue with stakeholders of all persuasions. If we could just develop an all-encompassing framework for how this would integrate into our enterprise-wide strategy, and manage it like a mission-critical project (complete with milestones, deliverables and accountability instead of fuzzy metrics like “buzz”), I am supremely confident that we could achieve escape velocity and – for the first time – truly establish and be able to articulate a synergistic, sustainable, and quantifiable strategy for leveraging “Best-In-Class” social media options to achieve desired corporate outcomes and maximize financial returns.

A Gift From Media To You

You know, it’s interesting. Somewhere in the convoluted catharsis of composing this confessional, I came to a surprising realization.  Maybe I don’t HATE social media after all. Maybe I just hate the Quixotic context in which most social media conversations exist, featuring a perpetually moving target, combined with an obsessive, cult-like worship of the default worldview, “If Something is New = It Must Be Good”, and where subjective criteria like “mindshare” and “impressions” are considered quantifiable deliverables and irrefutable barometers of success.

Come to think of it, maybe it’s high time that a C-level individual engaged this topic, and – once and for all –created a high-level overview and synopsis, crystallizing all of the strategic benefits and critical value streams, and distilling them into a language that speaks to executives everywhere in our native tongue – bottom line stakeholder value.

Part Two will run Wednesday.

“The number of text messages sent per user increased by nearly 50 percent nationwide last year, according to the CTIA, the wireless industry association,” The Time . “And for the first time in the United States, the amount of data in text, e-mail messages, streaming video, music and other services on mobile devices in 2009 surpassed the amount of voice data in cellphone calls, industry executives and analysts say.”

“‘Originally, talking was the only cellphone application,” Dan Hesse, chief executive of Sprint Nextel told the Time. ‘But now it’s less than half of the traffic on mobile networks.’”

I said I found it interesting that people were returning to the written word for communication. My friend said that wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He pointed out a couple of things: texts are never very long; and most people are not very good at communicating when they are limited in how many words they use.

I was reminded of one of my favorite Mark Twain quotes: “If I would have had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter.” The point the great writer was making is that it is much for difficult to communicate clearly when fewer words are used. It takes time and practice to learn to do it well. For instance, I usually rewrite my blogs at least twice. If I cannot cut out at least one-third of the words from the first draft, I assume I am doing something wrong.

I doubt anyone rewrites their texts before sending them. I suspect there is a lot of miscommunication because people never read over the text before sending. Plus, many people just don’t know what words mean or how to use them.

I thought that when my friend made that point. I agree, I said, but I am good writer. He agreed my texts and emails are usually well written – short and to the point.

Be that as it may, he added, how many good readers are out there? That brought me up short. So, I did a little research and found:

• U.S. adults ranked 12th among 20 high income countries in composite (document, prose, and quantitative) literacy, according to the Educational Testing Service.
• Nearly half of America’s adults are poor readers, or “functionally illiterate.” They can’t carry out simply tasks like balancing a check books, reading drug labels or writing essays for a job, according to the National Adult Literacy Survey of 1993.
• More than 20 percent of adults read at or below a fifth-grade level – far below the level needed to earn a living wage, according to National Institute for Literacy, Fast Facts on Literacy, 2001.
• 21 million Americans can’t read at all, 45 million are marginally illiterate and one-fifth of high school graduates can’t read their diplomas, according to U.S. Department of Justice.

Apparently there are many people who are not good readers. The Times story noted that almost 90 percent of Americans have mobile phones. So, many of those functionally illiterate people are texting.

Doesn’t sound a like a recipe for good communication to me. I am not even going to cover abbreviations like ROTFLMAO, TTYL, or all the others that seem like a foreign language.

My suggestion – trying actually talking. You might be surprised how much easier it is to communication.

Well, them whippersnappers couldn’t be more wrong. The New York City-based Nielsen found that boomers dominate 1,023 of the 1,083 consumer packaged goods categories. We watch 9.34 hours of video per day, which beats out any other age group. We also compromise a third of all television viewers, Web users, social media users and Twitter users. We are also significantly more likely to have broadband Internet.

“Marketers have this tendency to think the Baby Boom — getting closer to retirement — will just be calm and peaceful as they move ahead, and that’s not true. Everything we see with our behavioral data says these people are going to be active consumers for much longer. They are going to be in better health, and despite the ugliness around the retirement stuff now, they are still going to be more affluent,” Doug Anderson, SVP/research & development for Nielsen, told Marketing Daily. They are going to be an important segment for a long time.”

The Nielsen research found that while we Boomers spend 38.5 percent of all money spent on consumer priced good, only five percent of advertising dollars are spent trying to attract us.

For those of you keeping score at home, the Baby Boom began in 1946. Beginning in second of half of 1945 millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines came home from World War II. Those men had built of lot of um, energy, during the war. You can do the math on what happened when they got home.

By the time the Boom ended in 1964, there had been 75.8 million Americans born, according to the U.S. Census bureau. It stopped because of the introduction of the birth control pill.

I am a Boomer – I was born in 1954. I am often ticked off when I see marketing campaigns for products I am clearly interested directed at 25-year-olds. However, I sympathize with marketers trying to figure out how to reach us. Why?

Well, most marketing campaigns are designed to reach the widest possible audience. The strategies and tactics used in the campaign are created to reach the entire audience. You cannot do that with Baby Boomers. We are just too diverse.

Let me explain. Boomers range in age from 64- to 46-years-old. That’s a huge swing. Let’s look at three groups of Boomers.

A Boomer born in 1946 – the first wave – came of age during the 1950s and early 1960s. This was the time of sock hops, malt shops, Rebel Without A Cause, cheap energy and a pretty good lifestyle. This was the group who both became hippies and fought in Vietnam. They are now either retired or are thinking about. A lot of them are grandparents.

Someone like me who came of age in the middle-to-late ‘60s remembers the summer of 1968, with its race riots, anti-war protests, and assassinations. Vietnam had turned into a quagmire. The Cold War was raging. I remember being taught to hide under my school desk during the Cuban missile crisis. It was a dark, cynical time for the most part. We are struggling with the economy, although our children are now mostly on their own.

Someone born in 1964 came of age in the late ‘70s and early 1980s. I went to Woodstock – they went to discos. Theirs was the era Ronald Reagan’s morning in America, CD players, Jane Fonda’s workouts, and Yuppies. It was a much more optimistic time. They are probably trying to figure out how to pay for their kid’s college education.

So there you have it. How do you market to those three groups, even if they are lumped together under one name? It cannot be easy.

After all, one of social media strength’s is peer review. I like to see what other people say about a restaurant my wife and I haven’t yet checked out. I like to know what’s good, what’s bad and how well the servers handle things.

Foursquare also gives me a chance to tell others about places I like. Jody and I have pretty eclectic tastes in food, so we hit a lot of different places. As my future son-in-law has noted, I am Milwaukee’s unofficial ambassador.

Something odd has been happening on foursquare. I am getting requests to friend people from places including the Netherlands; New Zealand; India; and Germany. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have no objection to friending people who live in other countries. It is one of the things I like about social media. I have Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter contacts around the globe.

But I wonder why someone in India wants to know about the nightlife in Milwaukee? Are they planning a trip here? That would be nice. Milwaukee is a great city to visit. We have a lot to offer.

Still, I cannot help but wonder if I am being friended by people who really have no intention of ever coming to Wisconsin. Instead, are these people just trying to build up huge friend lists? It is some kind of high school thing where the person who has the most friends wins?

Before I go any further, I should note I have more than 8,000 Twitter followers, more than 7,000 LinkedIn connections and I just crossed the 1,000 mark on Facebook. However, most of that is for professional reasons. I follow people who have similar interests. Plus, I use my lists for as outreach for my clients.  I have to note having more 16,000 social media contacts is an incentive for people to hire me.

I don’t follow just anybody. As I have said, the minute you tell me what you had for breakfast, what cute thing your dog did, or you are going to have your nails done, I will unfollow you. I will also not follow anyone who promises to make me rich or plays games. I don’t believe the former and I think the later is silly.

The people I follow are marketers, flacks, and social media people like myself. I learn from them and I hope they learn from me. I will not follow people who do not meet my criteria. For me it is a matter of quality versus quantity.

I make somewhat of an exception for Facebook because I have family members and friends who I stay in touch with through the platform.

I have not amassed a large numbers of followers because I think it makes me cool. That is not the purpose of social media.

Yet, I think there are a lot of people out there who build lists indiscriminately. Why I am not sure. As I have said time and time again, the one with the most friends does not win.