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.

This is part two of social media firm DemingHill’s blog on why executives hate social media. For more information on DemingHill, click on their name.

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.

This is a guest blog from the social media firm DemingHill. Although it is very long, I found that it provides a lot of information about the C-Suite’s feelings about social media. Because of the length, I have split it into to two parts. Part two will run Wednesday. For more information about DemingHill, click on their name.

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.

I had dinner Sunday in Chicago with a good friend. During the course of eating great cheeseburgers at Jake Melnicks Corner Tap, we got talking about a a May 13 New York Times story that reported that mobile phones are now used more for texting than talking.

“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.

A.C. Neilsen has discovered that marketers are not going after we Boomers. Apparently, those marketing types assume we’re just quietly strolling around on our walkers from the shuffleboard court to a pinochle game. They apparently think the only products in which we are interested are Fixodent and erectile dysfunction medicine.

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.

I am a soccer fan. I grew up the playing and watching the game. I only quit playing because I dislocated my right shoulder for the second time.  I was glued to my television during the entire World Cup, watching every game I could.

So, I was really happy to find out how active FIFA and ESPN were in their use of social media to push the beautiful game in the United States. I think it definitely increased interest in the entire tournament. It was an impressive effort that paid off.

For you non-fans, FIFA is an acronym that stands for The International Federation of Association Football in English. In French it stands for the Fédération Internationale de Football Association, hence FIFA. The word soccer comes from the word Association. The English shortened “Association” to soccer. Don’t ask me why, I’m Irish by descent.

ESPN stands for Entertainment and Sports Programming Network. Enough with the language lesson.

Overall, viewership was up 41 percent from the English-language World Cup telecasts four years ago, according to the WorldCast website. Coverage on ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 averaged a 2.1 rating, 2.3 million households and 3.2 million viewers for the 64 World Cup games. The rating was up 31 percent from the 1.6 posted four years ago, while households increased 32 percent from 1.7 million and viewers rose from 2.3 million, the site said.

“Viewership in the U.S. was at its highest when the home team was playing in the tournament,” WorldCast said. “Through the first 50 games, the rating was up 48 percent, households increased 54 percent and viewers increased 60 percent.”

I should note that attracting viewers in the rest of the world is not an issue. According to ABC News 700 million people watched the championship game between Spain and the Netherlands. Show me any American television event that attracts even 25 percent of that kind of worldwide audience.

FIFA would like to make more inroads into the USA. We are, after all, the wealthiest country on Earth. Soccer is growing in popularity as a youth sport. We would seem to be a natural place for FIFA to focus.

FIFA and ESPN are run by very smart groups of marketing people. They knew if they encouraged the use of social media good things would happen. They apparently do not worry about things like trademark infringement. The results speak for themselves.

ESPN’s Facebook World Cup had over 600,000 people who “liked” the page. I know don’t where that ranks among Facebook sports fan pages, but it is impressive number. The Facebook soccer page has over two million fans. I didn’t count because who has that kind of time, but there has to be over a thousand pages of tweets with the hash tag “worldcup.”

Googling the term “world cup soccer blogs” produced 49 million hits. Now, as a blogger myself, I am willing to bet that there are not 49 million blogs about the World Cup. But, if there is even 10 percent of that number, that is impressive.

A quick YouTube search found just over 800,000 videos that somehow mention the World Cup.

You get the idea. As I said in a blog last week, FIFA knows what use to work won’t necessarily work anymore. So it moved on to a new method and it worked.

Although this wasn’t a rant, I do have one note. On Sunday, a friend and I rode our bikes to Port Washington, Wis. – 26 miles north of where I live. We stopped to enjoy that small city’s wonderful lakefront and marina.

Like any public area, there are posted rules of public conduct. What brought me up short was a sign that read: “Violations Will Be Enforced!”  So apparently rule breaking is required?

I was on vacation last week in Asheville, N.C. But you didn’t read about in anything I posted – not on Facebook, Plaxo, LinkedIn or Twitter. I posted nothing on Four Square about the places my wife and I ate, the things we did or where we stayed. I did not mention in last week’s blog post that I was going anywhere.

Why? It’s simple really – even in a time when I, and everyone else, is more connected than ever, it is important to maintain some privacy. As I have said, I don’t want to know what you doing every waking minute of your day. You shouldn’t care about what I am doing during my day.

I am constantly amazed by the amount of information people spew on the Internet. When I think about posting something, I use the supermarket checkout line test: if I were standing in the checkout line in my local store, would I turn to the person behind me and reveal something deeply personal. Remember, the odds are this person is a total stranger. The second part of the test is would that person care?

Of course, there is far too much interest in the minutiae of people’s lives. I saw an advertisement today for a new show on ABC called “Family Secrets.” The show’s teaser on ABC’s website says: “Why families keep secrets and what happens when the truth comes out.”

Come on, who in their right mind would go on national television and spill everything there is to spill about their family. And who would watch something like that?

There is another concern about being too open on the web – security. I will never understand why people announce to the world that they are not home. The Facebook announcement that the Hendersons are making an extended tour of the American West must make burglars drool.

Come on people, you think that everyone reading your posts is doing it because you are so interesting? Some of those readers are tracking who’s not home, when they will be gone, where they are, and when they will get back. No sense in rushing the theft if there’s no need. You mix a trip announcement on Facebook, some pictures posted during the trip and a couple of tweets about the Grand Canyon and you have burglary.

So, my advice is to be discreet. It is the best path to take.

Incidentally, Asheville, N.C. is a beautiful place. I recommend it highly for a place to relax and recharge.

Sunday night my local television news station teased story about the things people should not post on Facebook. The basis of the piece was how dangerous it is to post certain information on the site. People seem all too willing to give up vital information about themselves.

While all of the sharing social media has caused might be connecting people, I see a lot of danger in that. Is it a really good thing for people to know you ate at Ray’s Famous Pizza in New York, then went to see “Promises, Promises” on Broadway and finally dropped in for a nightcap at your favorite local bar?

I often hear complaints from people who are inundated with marketing solicitations. They wonder why they are they getting so many. Think about it. I think this trend is increasingly dangerous. Do we really mean to give up all of our privacy?

Today (Monday), I read a piece in the New York Times about the late author John Updike. It reminded my just how much things have changed in a very short time.

In the piece, writer Sam Tanenhaus that says “Updike was a private man, if not a recluse like J. D. Salinger or a phantom like Thomas Pynchon, then a one-man gated community, visible from afar but firmly sealed off, with a No Trespassing sign posted in front.”

Updike was a man of the middle 20^th Century, pre-Internet, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogging. I think the reason he could maintain that distance was that there were not the tools to break the walls he had erected.

I wrote on this topic last year. But since I did, even more ways to reveal yourself to the world have come along. Now there is Foursquare, a site that tells everyone what restaurants, movies and other things you attend. There are more and more review sites, which ask people to comment on a hotel, a car or a book. There are location sites that tell people exactly where you live and where you are traveling.

The amount of information people are willing to share with the world – or at least the 1.8 billion people on the web – is staggering. When I was a reporter, I used to tell people in a week I could tell their life story. I could do that because the paper I worked for bought proprietary databases. Some poor person had spent weeks gathering and inputting all of the information those databases contained. It took time to look through them and you had to know how search what you were looking for.

Now, I can do it an hour or two. It doesn’t any particular skill to gather the information. Anyone with some time on their hands can find out just about anything they want about anyone they want. Often that information is used maliciously.

While malicious use of information is one effect of this spewing, I wonder if there are other side effects? Do we really need to know everything about everybody? I am not so sure. I am curious as to what you think.

There’s no crying in baseball and no rules in a knife fight. But social media does have rules. Don’t know what they are or you don’t believe me? Well, read on.

Remember, social media is all about building a community. All communities need rules or they descend into anarchy. Hard to market anything in that environment.

I decided to start to codify what I believe are social media rules for two reasons:

• More and more, I seeing people do things on social media that really irks me. They have no idea of the purpose or reasons for using social media.
• I spoke last week on social media. I named some of the rules, but realized there was no one accepted set of the dos and don’ts. I have no idea if my list will become that set of rules, but somebody has to try.

So here is my list of social media rules with some explanations on why I feel the particular rule is needed.

Oh, one note – I doubt I will be able to cover all of the rules in one posting. I will most likely continue this Wednesday. Plus, I plan to list any suggestions you make. In fact, I want to encourage you to send me what you think should be rules for using social media. If you don’t like one of mine, tell me why.

Now then, here they are:

• Don’t lie. The reasons for that should be obvious. Social media is particularly unforgiving about anyone who tells a falsehood. It will destroy your, or your company’s, credibility.  No one buys from such a company or hires such a person.
• Do not spam. Here’s the definition of spam I like. It comes from answers.com: “Unsolicited e-mail, often of a commercial nature, sent indiscriminately to multiple mailing lists, individuals, or newsgroups; junk e-mail.”  You spam me, I report to you whatever provider you come from and I block you. I should add my rule is don’t ever solicit me. If I want a service you provide, I will find you.
• To follow up on that last point, soliciting business violates the spirit of social media. The whole point of social media is to demonstrate yours or your company’s expertise. If people like what you say, they will buy your product. You want to give people solid reasons to buy your product. You want your customers to endorse your products, which provides reasons for others to buy. It is like fishing: you cannot ask a fish to take the hook; you have to give it a reason, such as an enticing fly.
• I have four basic rules for connecting with me:
  • Use your real name. My first thought when someone uses a “cute” name, is what do they have to hide?
  • Post a picture. Again, what are you hiding from? Why don’t you want people to see what you look like? If you are company, post your logo.
  • Post a brief biography and a link if you have one. Again, what do you have to hide? I want to know something about you before I connect.
  • Ask me once, and only once, to connect. I get lots of email – somewhere around 100 a day. I might not get to your request right away. That does not give you license to bombard me with continuing connection requests. Doing that ensures I will not connect with you. One more thing, I do get through all of my email within two days of receiving it. If I don’t respond to your request, it means I have decided for any number of reasons not to connect. Don’t take it personally and don’t ask again.
  • Once we are connected, I also have rules:
    • Do not tell me what you had for breakfast, what cute thing your dog did today or that the sun is shining. I don’t care. I connect with people, who are marketers, bloggers, social media wonks, or into politics, fiction writers or people I find interesting. I am here to learn and discuss. If you post anything that falls into what I view as banal, I will block you.
    • Never, ever try to sell me anything, or tell me you have a surefire method for ensuring I will become a millionaire by working 15 minutes a week. I don’t believe you. I will never believe you.

Okay, that’s enough for today. I will cover some more rules Wednesday.

Please let me know what you think about these rules. Provide with me some of your own. I will report them.

So, I get a request from a frustrated marketing guy at a medium-sized company for some information on how to integrate social media into a campaign. I call the guy and we talk for bit. After getting the introductions out of the way, he fills me in on his company’s situation. I start to discuss some possibilities for social media marketing.

He stops me before I get wound up. His frustration comes from his superiors – he just cannot convince them that social media is the company’s best option. He wants my input on how to perhaps change their minds, although he is not hopeful.

Oh, for those of you who are wondering, my practice is to provide one free call or meeting on social media, marketing or public relations. After that I charge. Hey, I gotta eat too.

I tell the guy that my first rule with a client who has never done social media before is you have to crawl and then walk before you can run. What that means in plain talk is doing two apps before trying to do four or five. Trying to do everything at once is a formula for frustration and failure. I want my clients to succeed.

So, after hearing what the company does and its goals, I suggest starting a blog and creating a YouTube channel. Those two efforts would jive nicely with the company already does. Every study I have read say blogs are the most effective way to establish a brand’s identity. YouTube is a good way to demonstrate a product.

I am deliberately not providing any detail on the company’s location or products. I do not want this guy to get in trouble with his bosses. If you are boss who thinks it was one of your people who called, it probably wasn’t. Besides, my land line covers all of North America and I am adept user of Skype.

So, maybe if he eases them into social media, it will accepted, I tell him. Not going to work he says. He says  there was no way his company would agree to doing even those two applications. They wanted to stick with conventional marketing methods. I am still pondering this dilemma.

However, it is a common one. Despite that the fact that companies from IBM to Mom and Pop restaurants use social media constantly and effectively, many executives still don’t want anything to do with it. I don’t know why, but I have some hypothesis.

They are:

• The herd instinct. None of their competitors are doing it, so they don’t want to be first.
• The fear instinct. They are afraid they might not do it right or it might not work, so they don’t try
• The laziness quotient. Social media demands more time than conventional marketing. Many in the C-Suite don’t want to take the time to write a blog or tweet. They would rather an agency do their work.
• The ignorance problem. They don’t know who effective social media can be and don’t want to bother to learn.

I am sure these people have what they think are other valid reasons. They are not, and that’s just sad.

I have been a writer since I was five-years-old. My first piece was entitled “The Eagle That Had Acrophobia.” It was the first writing assignment I was ever given. It came from my kindergarten teacher toward the end of the year. I think the assignment was given to us to test how much we knew about writing and reading. I am not sure the content mattered that much. At any rate, I got a gold star for using all of the words correctly.

That was my first lesson in writing. Always make sure every word is used and spelled properly. Now, I still have not attained that proper state of writing, although I get closer everyday. I am getting closer because I care deeply about excellent writing and I work hard at it.

Which brings me to the point of this screed – how much just plain lazy and incorrect writing I see everyday. Now, I am not talking about typos. To me that’s an honest mistake. The key to read reread so they can be detected and corrected.

No, what I am talking about is the incorrect use of words, run-on sentences, sloppy logic, and just plain bad writing.

Look, social media demands good writing. I am not saying you have to be a Mark Twain or an Ernest Hemingway. I am saying all of the writing posted has to make sense.

Tell me if you can think of a social media application where the use of language is not important. For instance, every study I have read says blogging is the most effective social media application. Well, a blog has to be written, doesn’t it? Twitter demands clear, concise writing if a  thought is going to be stated clearly in 140 characters. For a YouTube video to make sense, the person speaking has to do it such a way that viewers can understand.

Yet, everyday I hear people talking about “building a new building.” Who builds an old building? Or look at the “new baby.” Ever seen an old baby – in the literal sense? Or one of my favorites – “this door alarmed.” How can one tell if a door is upset?

The other night I was watching the local news in Milwaukee. The newscaster talked about the “tragic death of a five-year-old girl.” Have you ever known the death of a five-year-old not to be tragic? Or “the fire totally engulfed the house.” Look of the definition of the world engulfed – “totally” is not needed.

I did a web search and found sterling examples of bad writing, such as:

• PET OF THE WEEK: Nannouk is a 10-week-old Spitz mix female and will grow to be medium sized. She does well inside. Sterilization is mandatory for anyone wanting to take her.
• Operationally, teaching effectiveness is measured by assessing the levels of agreement between the perceptions of instructors and students on the rated ability of specific instructional behavior attributes which were employed during course instruction. Due to the fact that instructors come from diverse backgrounds and occupy different positions within a given university, both individual and organizational based factors may contribute to the variance in levels of agreement between perceptions.
• The man was eating a fish that still had its head on and was drinking red wine in great gulps. The fish’s eyes looked alive.

My thanks to the University of Minnesota-Duluth for the examples. There are a lot more on the university’s website.

I am not going to get into people who don’t know the difference between then and than. Or writers that don’t know when to use who and that. I could go on forever.

Yes, those examples are all funny, but they are also sad. Allegedly educated people who spoke English as their first language wrote those three examples. What the hell is wrong with them?

I just had to rant about this. I know I am fighting a losing battle, but it doesn’t mean I plan to stop.



I am presenting at a session on social media Saturday at a conference sponsored by the Public Relations Student Society of America at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. I am looking forward to it. I enjoy talking to students because they have a lot fewer preconceived notions that we older types.

However, what these students don’t have is much social media knowledge. That surprised me.

In fact, in the last week it has been driven home to me how many people either don’t know, or don’t want to know, about social media. That was my awakening. It isn’t just students – it people at every level of every organization. I feel like these people are standing at the bottom of a mountain with their backs turned. The social media avalanche is roaring down and about to engulf them. Yet they can’t, or choose not to, hear the rumble of the approaching change.

The rate that social media is taking over is like an avalanche. I could give you numbers about how fast it is growing, but I am going to save that for another blog.

Curious about my metaphor, I did some research on avalanche survival. One of the things that experts advise is to swim in the flow if you get caught. The key is keeping your head above the snow. That’s good advice for people who about to be engulfed by social media – start swimming with the flow.

I do not include most students among that group. They clearly want to learn. That’s why I was asked to come and speak at UW – Whitewater.

When the conference’s student organizers first approached me, I assumed they wanted me to talk about social media marketing. I have met many Whitewater students. They are bright and committed. They also have never known a time without the Internet and computers. In contrast, I have known a time without push-button phones and cable television. Yes, I am that old.

So, I assumed they would know more about the various social media applications than I did. I figured these students didn’t need me to tell the basics. The two women organizing the conference gently disabused me of that notion. They told me students wanted to hear the basics. They wanted to learn about Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube and all of the other social media applications.

Now, I know UW-Whitewater Public Relations Instructor Ann Knabe is drilling her students in social media. I have heard from the students about that. Ann, who is a friend, is very good instructor. However, I guess the students want to hear from someone else who is actually doing it on a day-in, day-out basis.

As I said, I think a lot of people out there would like to know about social media and how to use it. But, they don’t understand the implications of social media taking over marketing. Or, they are just too embarrassed to admit they don’t know what to do.

That second point was brought up at a meeting I was at last week. I am a member of the Southeastern Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America’s social media committee. (Say that five times fast.) At a recent meeting another committee member talked about his experiences teaching social media. He said he runs into many adults who are afraid to admit they don’t know what they are doing.

Another thing I like about working with students is that they much higher embarrassment threshold. They are not afraid to admit they don’t know how to do something.

I think that embarrassment is why many companies are not moving faster to integrate social media into their marketing. But, hey get over it. There is nothing wrong with asking questions and admitting you don’t know something. So let this be your awakening. Doing nothing will get buried in the coming avalanche.

When I was a kid I was a huge circus fan. So much so that when I was nine-years-old, I got up at 4 a.m. to water the elephants that had arrived with a traveling circus which came to my small town in Upstate New York. For hauling around buckets of water that probably weighed more than I did, I had the run of the circus for the two days it was in town.

Walking around all day, I learned my first marketing lesson as I watched the barkers work. The line for the hootchie shows (girlie shows for you young ones) was long. All the barker had to do was collect the money. The garishly painted signs hanging from the tent did the work. The barker the outside the bearded lady’s tent was working a lot harder. He was literally at times trying to push people into the tent. I think he was even offering a two-for-one deal: the Bearded Lady and the Siamese Twins for the price of a single ticket.

What was I was seeing at the circus? Pull marketing always works better than push marketing. The hootchie barker let his product pull people into the tent. The Bearded Lady barker was not willing to do that. He tried to force the issue. He wasn’t letting his potential customers make up their minds on their own. If I remember correctly, the sign over the tent’s entrance said Bearded Lady, but that was it. There were no pictures.

No, at nine-years-old I didn’t know from push versus pull marketing. However, I did see who was getting better results with their approach. I remembered that later when I sold things for my  scout troop.

That’s the essences of social media – pulling in people through blogging, Facebook pages, Twitter, YouTube and all of the other social media applications. You have to give people a reason to consider your products. You cannot push them into buying anything. They need reasons that you give by using both social media and traditional marketing tactics.

That’s why I rail about things such retailers acting like spammers. No one can be strong-armed into buying something they don’t want. Social media demands what used to be called the “soft-sell.” You want to hold a conversation, not a lecture, with a potential client.

It is why I don’t like to deal car dealers, they always push. It is why I like to shop at Apple stores. You walk through the door, someone asks once if you need help. After that, you are left alone to browse. If you need help, someone answers your questions without trying to sell you anything. I think that’s why the profit those stores increased between 2008 and 2009 when most other retailers saw a sales decrease.

Granted the retail profit only rose from $1.33 billion to $1.39 billion – just a $60 million increase. Of course, sales doubled between 2007 and 2008. Retail profits rose from $573 million to the 2008 profit of $1.33 billion.

I should note I am a member of the Apple cult.

My point in this, though, is Apple and companies like it, succeed because they don’t push. They put their customers’ needs first. They give the customer what they want. It’s the same thing that circus barker did almost 50-years-ago as I watered elephants.

I spent 26 years as a working reporter. In that time, I dealt with a lot of traditional public relations and marketing pitches. Social media didn’t exist. While I was on the receiving end of many inspired pitches, all of them were basically the same. The only real difference was the quality of writing and the freebies those pitching tried to entice me with.

As a note: reporters cannot accept anything of value. It is against most publication’s ethics code. So don’t send anything. Anything I received went to charity if possible. If it was food, it went to a food bank. If it was perishable food or beer (hey, I work in Milwaukee) I shared with the entire newsroom. I always said – maybe I have my price, but other than Bill Gates, I doubt anyone could pay it. A box of cookies wasn’t going to influence me.

When I left journalism just over seven years, I went to work for any agency run by a former reporter. It was a great place to learn. Like everyone else, I did the traditional things one does in P.R. and marketing. The only difference for me was that my pitches and writing were better. I had a good track record there and at my next job.

The appearance of social media four years ago changed everything. It was also when I learned that traditional public relations and social media go very well together. I had a client that couldn’t get employees to open emails. After doing some research, we decided to a series of podcasts. The podcasts were very successful. It wasn’t even called social media then, the usual title was Web 2.0

The employees found out about the podcasts through the traditional channels. There was an announcement in the company’s newsletter; each department head received a written announcement to read to their employees. We also got some press coverage because at the time what we did was unique.

Without going into a lot of tedious detail, I soon learned when I went out my own that social media is becoming the dominant form of marketing. I have done everything I can to learn about it and how to use it. Still, the growing dominance of social media doesn’t mean that there is still not a place for traditional methods.

Do not discount the power of a story on the front page of a local newspaper or on the local television station. While it’s a shrinking group, many people still get their information from traditional media. That includes elected officials. It is silly to ignore those people. They are probably also on line, but what’s wrong with reaching them through multiple channels?

Yes, I advise sending out a social media press release. See last Monday’s blog for the reasons. But it is still a press release. Just in a super-charged form.

Twitter is a great place to release news. Many, many journalist now follow Twitter. Rather than call 50 reporters, you can send out one tweet and get journalists to call you. They might be working for a traditional outlet, but you reached out using social media. See, you married the two methods.

As for employees, I always advise a combination of social media and traditional methods. In any kind of many workplaces, manufacturing, retails, and others, employees are not going to have constant access to the Internet. They probably have it at home, but they are not at home at times when you want to get the word out. If it’s really important, you should have a face-to-face meeting. If it is not that important, but if you want employees to know something, there is nothing wrong with posting a notice where they can see it.

None of this changes my opinion that CEOs should be blogging, companies should have Facebook Fan pages, should be posting videos on YouTube, creating groups on LinkedIn and tweeting company news. That should be the primary focus.

But just as I use a hammer on home improvement projects that first belonged to my grandfather, traditional tools still have a place in marketing and public relations.

You’ve decided it’s time to dip a toe or more into the social media pool. You know the Internet can be a very unforgiving place. You want to make sure you are going to do it right. It’s time to hire agency, but before you do that you want to have your own plan. While you are going to listen to the agency’s advice, you also want to know the landscape and have a general idea of how to get from Point A to Point Z.

This is what I encourage all of my clients to do. Yes, I am the expert, but it helps when they have some ideas of their own. One of the mottoes I live by in my business life is: “all of us are smarter than one of us.” You should do the same. If an agency is unwilling to listen to your input, you are working with the wrong agency. You are paying the bills after all.

Before anything else, this what you have to keep in mind about social media: it is not a tactic, or a strategy or just another way to do what you have always been doing. It is an entirely new way of marketing and it is taking over fast. I am going to cover how fast next week, but know that its use is increasing very, very quickly.

So, what to do first? It most definitely helps that you have your own ideas. The first thing I do when I sign a new client is meet with the principles to discuss their wants and needs. The process goes much faster when both sides have a good idea of the road map they are going to use.

Remember, your social media, marketing and public relations plan should be key parts of the company’s overall strategic plan. Marketing communications should never be treated as an island or silo. Rather, it should be one of the engines driving your company to be successful.

Integrating marketing communications planning with the company’s overall plans is key. I have seen too many companies that keep public relations and marketing in silos. They are only taken out when some senior executive needs to get a message out or sales are dipping. That is just wrong. Public relations and marketing are a company’s front door. It is the first thing a potential client or customer sees.

So, the first step should be to do discuss and define what you want to accomplish. Do a situation analysis. Discuss what the positive and negative forces. Figure out who want to reach and how to do it. Come up with a goal. A goal should be a broad-based destination, where you want your company to go.

It will be up to agency to figure out to reach that goal, to come up with the strategy and tactics for getting you there. But it is key, especially in social media, to know where you are going.

The second thing you should know is that a successful social media campaign takes time and your involvement. This is not like an advertising campaign where you approve campaign concept, check in on the production and then approve the final product.

Social media is a continuing process. It calls for doing things such as blogging, tweeting, creating a Facebook fan page, and posting videos on YouTube. It is highly effective when done right. However, none of those are things you can do once and forget about. It takes your commitment to the process to make it work. Success does not come in a week. Usually it does not come in a month or two. I always tell clients to expect the process to take at least six months to show results.

But when those results do happen, and if done right, they will, the success will be far better than what comes from other method.

When I first met my doctor almost 30 years, I walked into his office, sat down and asked him: “so, what was your grade in anatomy?” He laughed. I asked the question again. He saw I was serious. He pointed to his medical school diploma that was hanging on the wall behind me. It said he had graduated summa cum laude. I was satisfied.

Why did I ask? Because as the joke goes: do you know what they call the medical student who barely passes? Doctor.

You should be asking the same kind of questions when you decide to hire a social media agency. Too many times, I see people and agencies pass them selves off as social media experts when in reality, all they have done is signed up for Facebook and have a Twitter account. When you ask if they use social bookmarking, or how they measure ROI, their eyes go blank. Or, they give you some gibberish about how ROI is difficult to measure.

The agency you want to hire should have a solid grounding in both traditional marketing and public relations and social media. They understand how to use both, how to meld them and how to measure results.

Social media as a method of public relations and marketing matured about four years. That’s when broadband became widespread. Broadband is necessary to run most social media platforms.

Because it is so new, there are not yet any solid standards for determining who’s an expert and who’s a pretender. I have studying and using social media for about three years. I started doing podcast scripts and moved on from there. I have been doing it long enough that I know what I am talking about.

What distinguishes one agency from another is how long they have been using social media, their level of commitment to it, and how successful they have been.

So, if I were looking to hire a social media expert, here would be the questions I would ask:

• How much experience with social media have you and your agency had?

You want to know if they attended a couple of webinars, maybe have a Facebook page and Tweet and now think they are an expert. That does not make them an expert, not by a long shot. Ask to see their blogs, Twitter accounts, LinkedIn usage, Facebook pages, and YouTube posts. This shows they are experienced users. Ask if they use Digg, Stumbleon and other social bookmarking sites.

• Where did they learn social media?

This shows their level of commitment. And also ask how they stay on top of the changing trends in social media. That’s important.

• Ask for the names of clients for which they have run successful campaigns. You want to be able to check on what they did and if it worked.

• How do they view social media – as a tactic, a strategy, or an entire new way of marketing?

The answer is the last one. Social media is not a one-off. It requires a commitment of time and resources. I would argue that it is more effective than traditional marketing, but it takes knowledge to do it right.

• How do they integrate traditional marketing and public relations efforts with social media?

Traditional methods definitely still have a place. Often there is a melding of the old and the new. Many journalists now use Twitter for instance. You need to make sure that traditional methods are not neglected.

• Who handles social media in their agency?

You want to know the senior people are committed to social media. You don’t want to find yourself working with some junior assistant account executive that got the assignment because he or she has a Facebook page.

• How do they measure Return On Investment (ROI) for social media?

There is no one method to do it. Personally, I believe it can best be measured by increased website traffic and sales, but there are other ways. Make sure the agency has a method for measuring ROI.

Those questions you should get started. Next week, I am going tell you about to set up a social media campaign.

And as for Wednesday’s rant: well, I am going to give you my take on NBC’s decision to interrupt the Olympic closing ceremonies.

Since posting the very popular rant last Wednesday on there being too many social media sites, I have had some requests for a post on what is proper social media etiquette. I wrote on the same subject almost a year ago. Like Emily Post did, I think it is time to update. So, let’s get to it.

• Let’s start at signing up for a site. Think of yourself as being at a party or in a meeting. You would tell people your real name, something about yourself and what you do. It’s no different in social media. So:
  • First, use your real name – not something cute. This is the only way that people are going to know you. If you were hunting for an employee, or hiring someone to perform a service, would you hire “drunkguy05” or “sexxxygirl02?” Plus, if you want to be found, the odds are much better if you use your real name.
  • Second, post a picture of yourself, not your dog, not a pretty sunset, or some weird avatar. People want to know what you look like. Why wouldn’t you post your own picture? You on the run from the law?
  • If you have one, include a link to a blog, another site such as LinkedIn or Facebook. This shows you are a real person. Definitely link to your website if you have one.
  • Include a short bio of yourself. Again, this gives people an idea of who you are.
  • This next rule should be obvious, but people violate it all the time. DO NOT SPAM. If you are joining a site simply to sell me something, go away. That’s not the purpose of social media. I am glad you asked – it is to have a conversation, link with like-minded people and share information. It is not to buy real estate in Goa, or some system that promises me I will get rich working five a hours a week. Or a system that makes me into a spammer. If I get those kind of invitations, I will block you, and I will report you to the site administrators. Of course, that goes double for all of those porn people out there.
  • Once you sign up for a site, it is perfectly acceptable to invite your friends – once. Not six times. As I said last week, if I don’t respond to your invitation, it means I don’t want to join. After the third time, I am going to send you to my spam filter, never to return. And know something about the people you are inviting. As a personal example, I am an Apple; I will never be a PC. So don’t invite me to join Windows Live. It is not going to happen.
  • On that subject, there is quantity versus quality debate in social media. Some experts argue that the idea is to accumulate as many followers as possible. Their thesis goes you want to distribute whatever you are sending out to the widest possible network. The other side it is better to be followed by a 100 people who are influencers in their networks. I come somewhere in the middle. It is up to you to decide. However, this is not high school – the person with the most friends does not win.
  • After you join a site, get active on it. Why else would you join?  That doesn’t mean you have to spend every waking minute posting. But, if you join Twitter, tweet twice a day. If you are Facebook, post an update or two each day. You get the idea. I will not follow anyone who invites me to join a site, but has done nothing there themselves.
  • As part of the above bullet, respond to other people’s post. That’s just good manners. If you want people to respond to what you do, you should have the courtesy to do the same for them.
  • Another thing for you LinkedIn people – unless you know someone personally or have worked closely with them, don’t recommend them. And do not send out blanket requests for recommendations to total strangers. How good could a recommendation be if you nothing about someone? Plus, what if you called by a potential employer who asks you about some stranger you recommended? You are going to look dumb and the odds are very good that the candidate will not get the job.
  • A final note – there is no privacy in social media. Well really, there is no privacy in the Internet Age period. So, if you don’t want people to know something, don’t post it anywhere. Things on the web never really go away. Along those lines, all of you college kids who have those really cool photos of that weekend in Cabo where you took your clothes off and jumped into the ocean – take them down. Many companies will not hire someone if they see such photos. Yeah, it is not fair, but that’s the way it is.



I am one of the most active social media users I know. I have more than 5,000 LinkedIn connections, more than 8,000 Twitter followers, about 500 Facebook followers and over 100 on YouTube. I blog twice a week. I also use Plaxo, FriendFeed and some other sites. I should be doing this – it’s my business. I run a social media marketing agency. Would you hire someone to do social media if they didn’t use it?

I have some problems with social media though – or more accurately, the people who are now using it. So, they are:

• The people who invite me to join a site to which I already belong. Every site has a search function that allows you to check members’ name. Do that before you invite someone to join Facebook or LinkedIn.
• The constant creation of new sites. I have yet to see one that could replace LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or Facebook. Look, this ground has been plowed already. I think those sites are here to stay. Maybe one of those four will be “AOL – The Sequel,” but I doubt it. That is not to say there are not some good sites, but enough already with the constant creation.
• The constant invitations I get to join those new sites. If I don’t respond, it means I do not want to join. Don’t keep sending invitations. It is annoying and a breach of social media etiquette. After three invitations, you go into my spam file, never to return.
• The growing number of multi-level marketing people appearing on social media. To paraphrase Shakespeare: spam by another name still smells as bad. Just because you are sending the information via a new medium doesn’t make it anymore believable.
• As long we are on the subject, no one works five hours a week and gets rich. Steve Jobs, George Soros, Warren Buffett and all those other self-made billionaires worked really hard to get where they hard. I suspect they are still putting in 15-hour days. The only people who make money off those schemes are those selling them.
• And one more point on that subject, you do not have to spend money on search engine optimization to get your webpage to the top of Google rankings. This blog is rated a top website by Google. It is consistently is on the front page of Google searches. I spent a lot of time achieving that, but no money. It just takes work.

Now that I have gotten that off my chest, I am curious what your social media pet peeves are. Let me know.

The latest statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor estimate the current unemployment rate at 9.7 percent. That’s 9.3 million people who are unemployed. Globally, it is estimated by the United Nations’ International Labor Office that 212 million people are out of work.

As a note, in the United States you are only of work if you are collecting unemployment. Once you stop, you are no longer counted. There are some arguments that the real unemployment rate is 17.3 percent – depending how you want to crunch the numbers.

Things don’t look good right now for a lot of job seekers.  There are approximately 2.4 million job openings in the U.S. according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. You know that expression about the five pounds of feces and the one-pound bag – well, I think we are seeing it in action.

I wrote about job hunting back in November. Things have actually gotten worse since then. I thought it was time to touch in the subject again, Here are some other suggestions on finding a job.

How Does Social Media Figure Into That?
What does this all have to do with social media? It’s simple really. With approximately four workers for every position, it behooves anyone looking for a job to develop an edge. The days of just sending out a resume, or responding to a job post are long gone. Let’s face it; any company with an opening is drowning in a tidal wave of resumes and cover letters. I doubt most are even read.

You need to do something to stand out – I mean really stand out. Yeah, you guessed it – get active on social media. Why? It will help you get noticed

Remember, most positions are never advertised. Companies that have openings compile a list of possible candidates through their own searches.

According to author Richard Nelson Bolles in his job-hunting book “What Color Is Your Parachute?” the average hiring manager is scared to death that he will hire the wrong person. Anything you can do to calm that person down is a positive.

Incidentally, I highly recommend Bolles’ book. It is old media, but it is very effective. It helped me when I changed careers.

Here are seven things I would do if I were job hunting:

• If I didn’t have one already, I would create a LinkedIn profile. Studies show that 80 percent of human resources people make LinkedIn their stop with looking for a new employee. Although I not seen a reason why that is, I suspect it is because LinkedIn is a trusted resource.
• On that LinkedIn profile, I would make sure my former co-workers had posted recommendations about me. Again, employers seem to trust these more.
• Also on LinkedIn, I would join the groups that correspond with my profession. I would do that for three reasons:
  • Almost all groups have a jobs section. It’s a good place to start looking
  • It’s a great place to network. Tell people you are looking for a job. Probably 10 percent of my over 5,000 connections list themselves as “in transition.” Talking to others in your profession will give you a leg up in the job hunt.
  • It is a good place to demonstrate your expertise. All of the groups list questions and statement from members. Answer those questions and respond to the statements. Ask your own questions.
• Start a blog about your area of expertise. Several studies have shown that blogs are the most effective kind of marketing. However, blogs are also the rated the most difficult thing to do. It takes time commitment and consistency to produce a good blog. But, it is the best way to demonstrate expertise. Write about what you did in career, talk about how you solved problems and the challenges you faced. All things a human resources person wants to know. Make sure you link the blog to your LinkedIn profile.
• Create a personal web page. It is very cheap to buy a domain name through a service such as Go Daddy. Make is a “business” page with you as the company. Sell yourself as if you were a company.
• Create a video resume and post it on YouTube. Again, link it to your web page LinkedIn profile. This will give potential employers a chance to see and hear you.
• I know some of you are going to ask about Facebook and Twitter. Twitter is a good to tell people about your blog and ask questions. Facebook – well, I am not so sure. Yes there are now 375 million who use the service. But, there is so much noise on it. I will tell you one thing you should do on Facebook – if you have embarrassing pictures, or questionable posts, take them down. Many employers are now requiring employment candidates to allow themselves to be friended on Facebook by the company so the company can review the candidate. The last thing you want them to see is that picture of you in Key West, drinking from a beer bong. I know of companies that have passed on people because of such pictures.

Good luck.

Writers note: I would to thank all of you that signed up with Google Friend Connect. It is both flattering and humbling to know you think enough of this blog to make that commitment.

Print publications are still a viable way to spread the news, a trio of business editors said last week. Print is still a vital to tell people what’s going, the three argued in a panel discussion held before the Southeastern Wisconsin chapter of the Public Relations Society of America.

“We are bullish on print,” Mark Sabljak, publisher of the Business Journal of Milwaukee. “Some people still enjoy a print product.”

All three seemed to be cautiously embracing electronic media. Salbjak seemed to be holding out the most. For instance, he noted he said in 2009 there would no blogging at the Business Journal until the paper found a way to make a profit on such an effort. The paper’s is now blogging because it has found a way to monetize the effort.

However, social media is changing the way news is being covered, said Steve Jagler, executive editor of Biztimes Milwaukee. Sites such as Twitter are not competition, he explained. Rather, it is helping the paper extend its brand, Jagler said. Social media amplifies the paper’s ability to report the news.

“We have a staff that understands the possibilities of social media,” Jagler said.

Social media has turned newspaper in 24-7 operations, said Chuck Melvin, assistant managing editor/business for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The paper now has new ways to deliver the news. The paper is not longer just print-based. It now uses Twitter and other services to disseminate its stories.

“We are not just print-based anymore,” Melvin said. “Social media is a new way of delivering the news.”

Social media has actually improved the Journal Sentinel’s ability to cover news. By using blogs, the paper can pay more attention to niche markets. He cited reporter Tom Daykin’s real estate blog and art critic Mary Louise Schumacher’s blog on the Milwaukee art scene as two examples.

“I see a lot of growth in our blogs,” Melvin said. “We are also working to add more video to our website. It adds a lot of value to the reader experience.”

All three editors said the key to a successful story pitch is keeping it simple, providing relevant information and making sure the proper journalist is targeted. It is important the person making the pitch is talking to the right reporter. That means knowing what people cover and what their interests are.

“Make sure you know the media company’s mission,” Jagler said.

All three also said it is still okay to over an exclusive story to one publication.

“It is the same situation as it has always been,” Sabljak said. “It is more challenging to get one in these days of 24/7 news coverage. But, my reporters are paid to get exclusive stories.”

The increasing dominance of technology has made the role of the public relations practitioner more important, Melvin said. A good P.R. person can play a vital role in telling reporters what’s going on. I would add that because there is so much information being circulated that no one person could ever keep track of it. A good, targeted pitch probably has a better chance than ever of getting a reporter’s attention.

While acknowledging that the need to get the news out faster than ever can be strain, all three also said that hasn’t made their staff’s lose perspective.

“We have not lost the ability to do the in-depth story,” Melvin said.

Okay, social media scares many C-suite people. That’s no surprise. Because if you are honest when you present, you should make them realize that using social media means acknowledging they don’t have complete control of their brand. Of course, they never really did. A brand’s identity is determined in the marketplace. It’s what consumers think – be they business-to-business or business-to-consumer – that defines a brand

It is hard for most senior executive to admit they really never had control of their brand. Facing that means acknowledging that all the money spent on marketing and advertising did not provide a failsafe way to ensure happy consumers and ever increasing sales.

Social Media will allow them to listen to what consumers are saying

Social media won’t do that either. However, unlike advertising, it doesn’t make that promise. What it does promise is a way to listen into and influence the conversation that is already taking place about a company or a brand. The odds are far better that there will be a positive outcome if a company knows what is being said.

Some executives will respond that they already know what their customers are thinking. After all, people will send emails when they have a complaint. That’s true. But remember, a person who is so upset that they are motivated to send an email is usually not representative of the customer base. Blog and Twitter comments will provide a far more accurate picture of what people are thinking.

Also unlike traditional marketing, those using social media want to hear the negative comments. How else does one get better unless one knows what the problems are? The good thing about this method it is much more inclusive. Rather than relying a focus group or a marketing study, a company has opened up its comments to entire customer base. That is much more representative of what’s actually happening.

How does one listen to these conversations? By creating a Twitter brand, by blogging, by having a Facebook page and a LinkedIn group. In addition, videos posted on YouTube are good. In each of these cases, and in other social media applications, you are looking for people to comment. It is from those comments that you will find what people are thinking.

Eventually what you to do is convert those commenter’s into fans and eventually evangelists for your brand. I will talk about how to do that in another post. But, I have just told you the first step.

Social Media takes time

After you describe all of this, the next objection is going to arise – social media takes time. Writing a blog, maintaining a fan page on Facebook, Tweeting and responding to Tweets, answering questions on LinkedIn, posting videos and monitoring and responding to comments are not something that can be done in an hour once a week.

These are many executives who used to their agency doing all the work. All they have to do is approve the campaign and make sure the agency has access to whomever it needs to work with at the company. It is a kind of “fire and forget” strategy. Now, you are asking them to become an active part of their own marketing effort.

Remember, social media is not a tactic or a strategy. It is an entirely new way of marketing. It requires a commitment to stick with it. Nothing turns off a potential customer more than sporadic, unscheduled use of social media. Blogs especially have to be posted on a specific schedule. Nothing kills a blog following faster than making it hard to find. The same thing applies to a Facebook fan page or a YouTube video channel.

This is, of course, your opportunity. You are there to teach them about social media and maintain their accounts. You are the solution to their problems of time management. It why they will hire you.

One note though – do not, ever, write your client’s blog yourself. You can edit it; you can proofread it, but don’t write it. That’s dishonest. PR firms have gotten into trouble for doing things like that. Tweeting for them is fine, as is maintaining the Facebook page. Just don’t be a ghostwriter. You want those thoughts about the company or product to come from someone who really knows it. Plus, consumers react badly when they perceive something isn’t what it purports to be.

There is more to do on social media. I will discuss the most important element next week. Stay tuned.

So, you review your new client’s needs and decide social media is the best course. Or, you are pitching a potential client and feel using social media would be the most effective way to meet their needs. The problem is the CMO and CEO are in their ‘50s and think The Wall Street Journal is the be-all and end-all of information dissemination. They think Facebook is a place where their kids waste time in mindless pursuits and tweeting is what birds do.

This is a more common situation than one would think. It is true that more and more major corporations are turning to social media for their marketing needs. However, there are still a large group of executives who frankly don’t get it.

As an aside, I have run into public relations executives who also don’t get it. They have told me they are taking a wait and see posture on social media. I get the feeling these people’s great-grandparents were buggy whip makers in 1908 when the first Model T drove by. They told themselves this automobile thing was a passing fad.

So, how to do you leap that hurdle?

So, how do you convince the person in charge that using Twitter, Facebook and other social media tools are the most cost effective – and just plain effective – way to market? It’s not easy, but it doesn’t have to be as hard as you would think.

The first step I take is to ask the person in charge if they use LinkedIn. According to the latest numbers I have seen, approximately 80 percent of employment managers go to LinkedIn first when looking to hire. So, the odds are fair to even that the CEO and CMO are at least familiar with LinkedIn. If you are really lucky, they have their own LinkedIn profiles.

The odds are also good that they don’t realize LinkedIn is a social media application. If they have a LinkedIn profile, explain they are already using social media. I often see resistance crumble at this point. Once they realize they are already using social media, explaining the rest is easier. You are not home yet, but at least you have hit a solid double.

But, what if they don’t use any social media?

Now, if they don’t have a LinkedIn profile, I sometimes show them social media’s dark side. “United Breaks Guitars,” the Motrin moms, and the Comcast stuff will often make the people in charge sit up and take notice. What I tell them is social media can kill your company before you even know you are bleeding. For instance, I have read estimates that United Airlines lost an estimated $100 million because of “United Breaks Guitars.” Watch a CFO’s ears perk up when he hears that number.

Of course, fear is not the only motivation you should use. After scaring them, tell them of social media’s successes. Southwest Airlines had one of its most successful fare sales ever primarily by using Twitter, Paula Berg, the airline’s manager of Emerging Media said at a conference I attended last fall. PepsiCo has pulled all its Super Bowl advertising. Instead of television ads, the soda company is going to spend $20 million on a social media campaign.

“… the Pepsi Refresh Project is about getting the global community to nominate projects that need funding in local communities, you upload your video/project profile, gather as many votes as you can by spamming the social sphere and the top projects will win finding from $5k multiple times per month up to $250k a few times every month,” according to the Digital Buzz blog.

There are a lot more examples of the successful use of social media. There are thousands of companies using Twitter. Ford, Honda, Jet Blue, the Marriot Hotel chain, Wachovia, and Sun Microsystems are heavily involved in it. You will find the same results for companies using Facebook.

Remember, most CEOs – especially in this business climate – don’t want to be a pioneer. They want to know that whatever you are proposing has worked for someone else. Once they know it has worked for others, they are willing to listen.

Now, if you find their competitors are already using social media, you have broken through another wall. Remember, those C-suite people are judged on results. Their board of directors, their shareholders, their lenders, analysts and journalists are all looking over their shoulders. Those company leaders do not want to discover they are losing market share to a competitor that is using Facebook or Twitter when they are not. In this case, they already see the benefit.

There is much more to talk about when it comes to pitching social media. I will cover more of the topic in next Monday’s blog.

This is the headline from the Dec. 11, 2009 crainsnewyork.com online business magazine: “367 magazines shuttered in 2009.”

The article goes on to report that: “As bad as the news is, the pace of decline appears to have slowed. In 2008, a total of 526 U.S. magazines ceased publication. In 2007, there were 573 that shut down.

The number of titles that folded may actually be higher, said Trish Hagood, president of Oxbridge Communications, parent company of MediaFinder, which describes itself as the largest online database of U.S. and Canadian publications. She explains that it will take until well into the new year to do a final tabulation.”

A knowledge gap is being created

I decided to write this blog because of last week’s announcement that two venerable magazines were shutting down: Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Reviews are being shuttered.

I know neither of these of magazines would be the kind likely to be sold at the grocery store checkout (except maybe for grocery stores in Cambridge, Mass, the lower East Side of New York and Berkley, Calif.). But, they served important purposes in their niches.

The century-old Editor & Publisher covered the newspaper industry. When I started as a reporter in 1975, it was a must read. If you wanted to know what going on in the business, you read E & P. I got my first two reporting jobs from classified ads in the magazine. It was a magazine in which readers’ actually read the ads first, especially the classified job listings.

Kirkus Reviews published over 5,000 book reviews annually. It was an important outlet, especially for new authors. It was often the first public exposure a first novel received. Kirkus was an important resource for bookstore buyers. They would often choose a novel to offer to their customers based on something they read in the magazine.

Personal note: As one who is writing a novel, and hoping to get it published, I mourn the loss of Kirkus. I also mourn the loss of E & P. It was an important press watchdog.

The closing of those two, and other magazines, is creating a knowledge gap.

Magazines used to occupy a unique place in news and information publishing. Newspapers were looked to as a daily source of information. That role has largely been taken over by Web-based news sources, including Twitter. Magazines were the source of the longer, more in-depth pieces. Magazines had the space and time to really tackle a subject. But, they were more immediate than a book.

With the death of so many magazines, a valuable source of explanation and analysis is going away. Oddly, to me at least, many newspapers are trying to turn themselves into daily magazines. They write long investigative stories that often run for several pages. That’s not why people read newspapers. They want to know what’s going on in the neighborhood. People don’t have time to ready long stories in the morning – when newspapers are delivered.

There is a solution

Yeah, you guessed it – I think magazines should be moving on line completely. I know Editor & Publisher has been on-line since the ‘90s. Kirkus is also online.  However, I don’t think either did a very good job of bringing readers to their websites. Like a lot of other publications, I think they saw the websites as an auxiliary to their print editions. It should have been the other way around.

There is precedent for this – the move of soap operas from radio to television in the early 1950s.

A little history first. In 1946, there were approximately 10,000 television sets in the United States, according to questia.com. By 1950, there were 3 million and by 1953, half of all households in the United States had a television. Kind of sounds like the growth of social media, doesn’t it?

Proctor & Gamble started soap operas on radio during the Depression. It was a marketing decision to sell more laundry soap and other products. When television began to dominate, P & G moved the soaps to television. After all, you go where the customers are – which is a rule of social media by the way.

So, why can’t magazines do the same thing? The web is becoming the dominant media – so why not move to the customers are? More and more people are doing their reading online. I still get Sports Illustrated’s print edition, but I also read it online every day. SI and other publications can do more on the web – post videos, run a lot more pictures, link to other relevant sites and be a lot more immediate in their analysis.

I think that move would save a lot of magazines. In cost alone, it would be a good move. No longer would a publisher have to factor the cost of production and printing.

Seems logical to me. Any thoughts anyone?

Note: I will not be posting on either next Monday or Wednesday. It is a holiday week and I am taking some time off. The next blog will run Jan. 4, 2010.

Welcome to the second part of Public Relations 101. This Wednesday blog is where I will be giving you my opinion on various marketing communications efforts.

I see my Monday blog as a kind of primer on marketing, public relations and social media. There is some opinion in it, but basically, I hope you are reading to learn what I know. I appreciate that hundreds of people who read and comment on it.

I greatly enjoy writing it. I will keep at it. But, because I try to keep the lessons to around 1,000 words – long for a blog I am told – I don’t have the space to review marketing campaigns. So, this blog has been born. I don’t have a title for it, so suggestions are welcome. I do expect to start some debates; in fact I want to start some. It is how we all learn. I do not have all the answers. I don’t even know all the questions.

I hope you all read this one as much as you read my Monday offering. So, let me get to it.

I am very active in social media. As I am sure you have noticed, I blog. I also tweet, spend time on Facebook and am approaching 5,000 contacts on LinkedIn. While I have only posted one video on YouTube, I watch it a lot.

I also am active on Plaxo, dabble on FriendFeed, use Digg and read Mashable. I am willing to bet I use social media a lot more than most. When you throw in my age – I am 55 – I am definitely ahead of any curve you can name.

Yet, lately, some parts of social media have started to frost me.

First, somebody has to destroy the keyboards of a lot of social media developers

Why you ask, a look of bewilderment on your face. You just told us that you are an active user of social media. What’s the problem?

This is how I feel when I get yet another site invitation.

I will tell you. There are too damned many sites coming out there are trying to imitate LinkedIn, Facebook and YouTube. Everyday I get invited to join some new site that says it will make my life easier. I think sometimes that the late pitchman Billy Mays’ last act was to  create all of these sites. The copy that comes with these sites is eerily close to how Mays used to sell products.

Look I am a huge believer in social media. I firmly believe it is replacing conventional advertising, marketing and public relations. Everyone should be using the Big Four plus one – LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and blogs. Okay, I agree Digg, Mashable and Technorati are also important. A case can be made for Friendfeed and a few others. If I lived in Brazil or the Middle East, I would use Orkut.

But, geez, every time I one of my email accounts, there are half a dozen invitations for sites I never heard of. We don’t need all them. I know the shakeout is coming, but fast enough for me.

Second, I am really tired of all these social media “experts” who claim they can make me a million dollars in the time it takes to trim my nails

To all of you who send these schemes to make millions on the Internet – GO AWAY! You may not know you’re lying, but I do. As the cliché says: “if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”

If you use the term guru when you send me an email, I going to hunt you down and slap you silly. Guru is a religious title akin to Father, Rabbi or Imam. Here are the first two definitions of Guru: (n) guru – a Hindu or Buddhist religious leader and spiritual teacher; Guru: each of the first ten leaders of the Sikh religion.

So, why not call yourself the Marketing Pope or something and be done with it.

Plus, I want to know what qualifies somebody as a social media expert? I belong to the Public Relations Society of America – the public relations industry group. The PRSA bestows a designation called APR or Accreditation in Public Relations. An APR is earned an by taking both written and oral examinations. The standards are rigid.

As far as I know, there is no social media industry wide group that bestows such a designation. I know there are individual training companies that give out accreditations. But, as I said, there is no agreed upon industry wide designation.

So, to me the only thing that works in proving you are an expert is if you have actually run effective social media campaigns. So, if you haven’t, stay away from me.

Until Monday, later all.

I read a story the other day from the online Kansas City InfoZine about how easy it is to trick Facebook members into revealing personal information. This is a hacker’s dream.

IT security and data protection company Sophos “created two fictitious users with names based on anagrams of the words “false identity” and “stolen identity”. 21-year-old “Daisy Felettin” was represented by a picture of a toy rubber duck bought at a $2 shop; 56-year-old “Dinette Stonily” posted a profile picture of two cats lying on a rug. Each sent out 100 friend requests to randomly chosen Facebook users in their age group.

Within two weeks, a total of 95 strangers chose to become friends with Daisy or Dinette – an even higher response rate then when Sophos first performed the experiment two years ago with a plastic frog. Worse still, in the latest study, eight Facebookers befriended Dinette without even being asked.”

Of those who responded, 89 percent of the 20-somethings and 57 percent of the 50-somethings gave away their full date-of-birth, Sophos said. Nearly all the others hid their birth year, but this is often easy to calculate or to guess from other information provided. Even worse, just under half of the 20ish crowd, and just under a third of the 50ish crowd, gave away personal information about their friends and family.

I hope I don’t have to explain why doing what those people did is a huge, huge, snafu. I am sure most of you have heard of the researchers who were able to figure out social security numbers just from the information posted on Facebook.

Be Careful

The lesson from that story and others is be careful. The Internet is kind of a like a major city. It has high-end areas, middle class areas and its downright dangerous areas. The people who create those dangerous areas will try to move into the other two because that’s where the money is. If you exercise some common sense, you probably won’t have to worry too much about the bad areas.

I say you won’t have to worry too much because a little healthy paranoia will keep you safe – in life and on the Internet. Put another way; exercise street smarts when you are out there.

My rule is I only post information that is already public.

Yes, there are dangers lurking out there, but by using a little common sense, trouble can be avoided.

Do simple things and you should stay out of trouble. The biggest thing to do is be careful who you share your information with. I probably get somewhere around two dozen requests Twitter follow requests each day. I accept maybe half. Multi-level marketers, get rich quick schemes and other things of that ilk always get rejected.

I have a policy that I never, ever open a link from a Twitter direct message – even if I know the person who sent it. As I am sure you have noticed, many Twitter accounts are being hacked. The hackers use those accounts to send out viruses and other malicious things. I have the same rule for email – unless I know the sender.

As for Facebook, I am very careful who I share information with. That is why I have almost 5,000 LinkedIn contacts and only slightly over 400 Facebook contacts. Generally, the people I follow on Facebook have to already friended people I know.

Also, when I search, I very careful what links I open. Hackers have figured out how to create legitimate looking sites. If the site seems the least bit strange, I don’t open it.

That doesn’t mean pull your horns in though

Social media is here to stay. It is taking over, not going away. So, don’t shy away from using it. That’s just counterproductive.

There are some things you should do and not do when you use social media. They included:

• Post picture of yourself – not your dog or the sunset, a short biography and a link to blog or a website (if you have either) when you join any site. Don’t worry, this is not the kind of information that will be much help to a hacker. I wouldn’t put my street address or zip code in, but other information is okay. Those links are important. It will drive your readership up.
• Use your real name. I find it hard to take anyone seriously who uses a name of say “seoguru” or “happygirl77.” You are building your brand here, remember. You want to use a real name.
• You know those Facebook or MySpace pictures of that great Spring Break – the one where you posted pictures showing off the sayings your friends painted on your half-naked body when you passed out? Take them down and hope no one circulated them. I know of hiring managers who decided against hiring someone based on similar pictures.
• Social media means being, well, social. If you join a site, participate. If you join a LinkedIn group, answer questions, or post of your own. On Facebook link to interesting articles and comment on other people’s postings. On Twitter, recommend good people to be followed on #FollowFriday, retweet interesting comments, and post good stuff yourself.

A note about using Twitter – my rule on Twitter is the first time you post what you had for breakfast, or what cute thing your dog did, I will stop following you. To me, Twitter is a site to share information and debate questions, not get cute.

I hope those tips help.

Now, an announcement: starting this Wednesday, I will be posting an addition to PR 101. This new section will be my take on various advertising, marketing and public relations campaigns. It will be on the same URL: http://www.pr101.biz

I see my Monday blog as a kind of primer on marketing, public relations and social media. There is some opinion in it, but basically, I hope you are reading to learn what I know. I appreciate all of the hundreds of people who read and comment.

Because I try to keep the Monday blog to around 1,000 words – long for a blog I am told – I don’t have the space to say everything I want. So, I am starting the Wednesday blog. I don’t have a title for it, so suggestions are welcome. I do expect to start some debates; in fact I want to start some. It is how we all learn.

So please give it a read this Wednesday. Thank-you.

I have to make an admission right up front this week’s blog about job hunting: I am torn about Facebook and its effectiveness. I am not sure whether the largest social media site on Earth – 350 million users and counting – is where you want to be in your job hunt.

I know Facebook can hurt you in a job hunt. I plan to go into the don’ts of social media job-hunting next week. However, one thing I will say now – would you hire someone whose Facebook pictures included topless photos from Cabo or the beer bong drinking championships? I wouldn’t either. Take those pictures down ASAP. Those can never help, especially if you want to be taken seriously.

Be that as it may, I am going into the pros and cons of Facebook and let you decide what to do. I have to say that if I were looking for a job, I would not use Facebook. That’s my bias. I want that stated up front so you know. I will keep try to keep my bias out of this blog as much as possible, but just keep that in mind.

So, let’s get into it.

The Pros Of Using Facebook In A Job Hunt

The first reason to use Facebook is its sheer size. At over 350 million users and growing, it is the largest social media site on Earth. It is has penetrated the entire developed world – just about everyplace you would want to work. Judging by the 400 or so followers I have on Facebook, I would say that the people who use the platform are pretty representative of the Earth’s population.

Secondly, many, many companies are using Facebook for marketing and sales. A lot of people don’t seem to know that Facebook has business pages. A lot of companies use those pages. It is good place to check out potential employers. You can tell by a company’s marketing efforts that they are targeting for sales. It can give you a sense of their needs.

Third, a Facebook profile is more informal than LinkedIn’s. In this age of getting to know the real person, a potential employer will often feel that your Facebook profile is a better picture of who you are.

There are two things about your profile I want to say. This applies to all social media, not just Facebook.

When you post your profile, include a picture. I have face I think scares small children, but I still post my picture. Frankly, I am suspicious of people who don’t. Unless you are the run from the law, your creditors, or an angry ex-spouse, there is no reason not to post a picture. Excuse the pun, but it helps potential employers get a picture of who you are.

Okay, so maybe this is not the kind of picture you should post with your profile. But, it is important to post a photo.

Use your real name when you set up a profile. Again, why wouldn’t you use your real name? Any employer who is doing their job is going to search out all of your various social media applications. How is going to look when they find your Twitter name is “drunkguy39” or “sexxygirl?” Not good I think.

The Cons of Facebook

Before I get started, “The Cons of Facebook” would be a great movie title. It sounds like the title of an S.E. Hinton novel. It could be set in a prison. A group of convicts, led by an imprisoned hacker, could be trying to use the Internet to escape a despotic warden. Think it has legs?

Getting to the real cons, my major complaint about Facebook has always been there is too much noise. Besides profiles and pictures, there are games, ads, causes and a host of other things. It is a not a clean experience for any employer trying to check out an employee.

To me, Facebook is a place to play, while LinkedIn is a place to work. It’s that simple.

Plus, people tend to be more frivolous on Facebook. I don’t know why that is, but happens. I have been guilty myself sometimes. You find yourself answering quizzes such what “Sopranos” character one would be, or backing a political cause. Most companies shy away from any political involvement. It is just bad for business. You never know what a client’s political stance might be. So, I think a hiring manager might not contact a person who espouses some strong belief.

I am not saying you shouldn’t have strong beliefs. Just be careful who you share them with. And if you put them on Facebook, you have shared those beliefs with a lot of people.

Well, that’s my advice for this week. Next week, I am going to write about the don’ts of social media job hunting. I have touched on some of them, but I want to hit them all.

Also, if you have been using social media for job-hunting, I would like to talk to you. I would like some real world examples of what works and what doesn’t work. We can do this anonymously or I can use your name. Leave a comment if you are interested.

Finally, on a professional note, I find I suddenly can handle two more clients for my agency. We are a full service social media, public relations and marketing company. Contact me if you would like to talk. Thanks.

So, last week we talked about using social media to find a job. Here’s the second part of that.

I have been asked two questions on using social media in job hunting. In the first one, the writer said he had a hard time taking social media seriously. He observed that most social media applications were created and used by 20-somethings. He wondered on how many people older than that actually used social media.

That’s an important question. If social media’s primary audience is made up of teenagers and 20-somethings, what’s the point of using it to find a job?

Well, it is true those age groups are active users of social media. However, so are millions of people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond using social media. As for companies, the last figure I saw showed over 15,000 companies using Twitter for a variety of reasons. According to Strategy Labs, the 35- to 55-year-old segment using Facebook grew 172.9 percent between 2007 and 2008.  In January of 2009, Strategy Labs estimated that almost 7 million people in that age group were Facebook users. The average age of LinkedIn users is 41-years-old.

Another statistic – according to Nielsen, 80 percent of employers start their search for employees on LinkedIn. Obviously, that’s a site a job hunter wants to be a part of. In fact, social media is a place a job hunter should want to be.

As for the second question – what does one write about?

Actually, that’s a pretty easy one to answer – write about what you are good at professionally. If you were a supply chain manager, write about the time your chief raw materials supplier suddenly couldn’t give you all of the widgets you needed. Talk about how you handled that situation. Or write about the time you primary shipper screwed up shipping product to your largest customer. Write about you how you solved the problem. You can also write about dealing with difficult employees or the time you planned the employee summer outing.

You get the idea. If you have specific questions, email me and I will try to help.

Here’s the key on whatever you write about: what you are doing is demonstrating your expertise by giving real world examples of how you used it. This is a much more dynamic way to show what a valuable employee you could be than handing in a two-page resume with a three-line description of the situation.

That’s the key to using social media in job searching – it is a dynamic way to show you are the person that fits the job. It is much better than blindly sending out resumes. Think of it this way, you are baiting a trap for potential employers. When they read your blog, they just might think this is a person they need to interview.

Which brings me to my next point, creating and setting that trap. I know I keep hammering this point, but it’s the key to social media: the hunters have become the hunted. While there are never any guarantees, social media can make you the prey for companies looking for someone with your skills. However, you are prey working to attract the hunter.

Another satisfied job hunter who used social media to get back into the workforce.

So, how to do you do that?

Well, the second point I keep hitting is that social media is a toolbox. As I have said before, you can build a house using only a hammer and saw, but it will go a lot easier if you use all of the available tools.

The blog should be your foundation. It will give you the most amount of space to demonstrate your expertise. LinkedIn should be next for three reasons:

• As I said, it is the first place most employers look for potential hires. A LinkedIn profile is more complete and in-depth than a resume. LinkedIn asks for a lot of information, which is a good thing. Someone looking for a new employee will be able to immediately evaluate potential candidates. Posting a link to your blog will help also.
• Most people on LinkedIn have third party recommendations from former co-workers or clients. These are invaluable. Someone who has garnered three or four recommendations will stand out from the crowd. One thing: it is perfectly acceptable to solicit recommendations from people who know you well. It is not to solicit recommendations from people for whom the only contact you had with them is through LinkedIn. How good could recommendation be anyway from someone who doesn’t know you?
• LinkedIn hosts thousands of different groups covering every possible profession. Joining those groups allows you to connect with professionals in your field. Members of those groups post discussion topics or questions. Joining in the discussion or answering the question is another way to demonstrate your expertise. In addition, most groups also post job openings. Those listing are a lot more current than anything you will find on a job board.

The next tool I would suggest using is Twitter. You can tweet about your blog posting – once – as I do. Once is okay because you’re telling people it is up. Anymore than that and you are bragging. In addition, there are many links to questions and discussions posted on Twitter. Again answering shows your expertise. In addition, you can join Twitter discussion groups. Discussion groups are delineated by a hash tag, which looks like this “#.” So a group would like this #publicrelationspros. You find groups by using Twitter Search. You are then talking to like-minded professionals who might just know about a job. Make sure your Twitter profile reflects what you are good at.

As a crazy suggestion, you might want to record and post a video blog on YouTube. They are usually called Vlogs. If you feel comfortable doing this, get yourself a web cam and go at it. I would suggest at least doing an outline of what you are going to talk about. And practice, and practice, and practice some more, before you record. , I have found rehearsing eight times is the most effective for some reason. I don’t why – it just seems to work. You want to sound natural when you talk.

Doing a Vlog gives a potential employee a sense of how you handle yourself. It can demonstrate your presentation skills. But, if you don’t feel comfortable or you are the kind of person who freezes in front of a camera, don’t do it. It will do more harm than good.

Well, that’s all the time we have. However, I am getting so many responses to the job-hunting blogs, I am going to continue writing about the topic next week. See ya then.

As all of you I am sure have seen, I am very active on social media. A key part of social media is connecting with people. In the last three months or so, I have seen an increase in the number of my connections who are out-of-work. I don’t care what Wall Street says, things are still tough out there. I have never counted how many job seekers I have connected with, but I would estimate it’s between 10 percent and 15 percent.

For a benchmark, between LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Plaxo, Digg and some other sites, I have more than 14,000 contacts.

I have a policy of replying to almost everyone who connects with me. I tell all job seekers the same thing – social media could be the key to finding a job. There are no guarantees on that. But, I think social media gives a job seekers a lot more than just a leg up in the market place. I think it gives them a Lambeau Leap up.

Note to my non-American and non-football fan readers: a Lambeau Leap is what Green Bay Packer football players do when they score a touchdown. The player who scores jumps about 10 feet up into the stands to celebrate.

By using a combination of blogging, a profile on LinkedIn, being active on Facebook and maybe even posting some YouTube videos – you can become a target for hiring managers. I cannot promise you will get hired, no one can. But, I can show you how to get your whole body in the door.

What social media will do for a hiring manager is provide a complete picture of your knowledge and skills. Let’s face, a resume is a like family portrait. Everything in that portrait and your resume are clean and neat. That resume no more defines exactly who you are than that family portrait shows what a family is really like. Does a family portrait show the work that goes into raising a family? Does a resume show how you spent weekends earning your Six Sigma designation?

Social media can, if used correctly.

As usual, I have more to say that I can fit in the approximately 1,000-word limit I set for myself. So I am going to take two weeks to cover this.

So how does social media help a job seeker? The same way it helps a company. It establishes your brand. Yes, you have a personal brand. You might not realize it – but you do. A brand makes you a standout in the marketplace. If you don’t maintain that brand, you will find yourself at the back of the line.

Job-hunting is very crowded marketplace right now. It’s a buyers market. Anything that can be done to make a candidate stand out is a good thing.

The first thing you have to know if you decide to head down this road is that takes more work than a traditional job search. You are not going to be just cruising the job sites, sending out resumes, networking, and cold calling your old contacts. In fact, most of that is going to go on the back burner – with the exception of the networking. You are still going to have to talk to people. But by using social media, they are going to know who you are and what you can do for their company.

That last sentence is key. You should not be using social media to pound your own chest. The same rules apply to personal social media as to business social media. Just as that attitude turns off customers, it also turns over hiring managers. What you should be doing is demonstrating your expertise in your profession. We will discuss next week the mechanics of doing that.

You want to be able to show that hiring manager that you really know about widget production or copyediting or whatever. As Richard Nelson Bolles says in “What Color Is Your Parachute,” a company wants to know how you can help them.

The other thing you should do is buy “What Color Is Your Parachute.” In my opinion, it is the single best job-hunting book ever written. It was a huge help to me when I switched from journalism to public relations. A good friend – Dave Vogel – gave me the book. I am paying it forward now.

Note to the FTC: I have never met Richard Nelson Bolles or any representative of his or his publisher. I not have not received any compensation – monetary or otherwise – to plug the book.

The second change is the same as business social media – the hunters have become the hunted. Nowadays, hiring managers are as likely to go looking for the right candidate as waiting for a resume to show up in their email box. Using social media will help you attract that hiring manager.

As Bolles and others have pointed out, the majority of available jobs are never advertised. Those that are on such sites as Monster, Career Builder and other’s attract thousands of resumes. Steve Jobs wouldn’t stand out in that crowd.

Social media could even help this guy. He could sell more apples - or get off the street and back into an office.

Another thing I learned from reading Bolles’s book is that hiring managers are terrified of making a mistake in their hiring decisions.

“As you go into the interview, keep in mind that the person-who-has-the-power-to-hire-you is sweating too,” Bolles wrote. “Why? Because the hiring interview is not a very reliable way to choose an employee.”

Bolles points out that a study conducted in the United Kingdom several years ago found that the chance of an employer hiring a good employee through the hiring process was only three percent better than if they had picked the name out of a hat. If the interview was conducted by someone who would be working directly with the candidate, the odds dropped to two percent. If it was done by a “so-called personnel expert,” the success rate dropped to 10 percent below that of the hat method.

Bolles lists 11 reasons why hiring terrifies company hiring managers. I will give you two that social media job searching has direct effect on:

• “That you won’t be able to do the job: that you lack the necessary skills or experience, and the hiring-interview didn’t uncover that.
• “That it will take you too long to master the job, and thus it will be too long before you are profitable to that organization.

You can see why the process terrifies those making the decision. Social media can remove some of that anxiety.

Next week, I will discuss how social media will demonstrate that you will be able to do the job from the day you hired.

Note: The blog talk radio show scheduled for tonight has been canceled.

Note Two: Because of a fight with my ISP, I am no longer sending group emails alerts about the latest blog. So, if you know somebody who was receiving it that way, please tell them They can sign up for the RSS feed. Thank you.

So, you’ve have convinced whatever powers-that-be that you deal with that it’s time your company started using social media. Paying for your initiative, you’re delegated to be the social media point person. You think how hard can this be? You use email, you have a Facebook account and you even use Twitter now and then. You feel like you know what you are doing. That is, until you start the process of looking at which social media applications should be incorporated into the company’s marketing efforts.

That’s when you say: “oh Lord, there are so many social media platforms. Which ones can I use and which ones do I lose?” (Try not to say that out loud. People will stare). For you clicked on a sharing icon and saw 150 different social media platforms come up. You feel like Groucho Marx in “A Day At The Races.” Cold sweat trickles down the back of your neck. How are you supposed to navigate all of that and make an informed decision.?

Don’t worry, no one uses 150 apps. I use social media everyday and I doubt I could name more than 20 applications. You can ignore 90 percent of those. Why are there so many?

Right now, social media can be compared to the early days of search engines. Do you remember Open Text, Magellan, Infoseek, Snap, and Direct Hit? Eventually there was a shakeout and they went away. Others are still around, but have morphed into serving different needs. Today, Google dominates search. According to cnet.com, Google handled 69.5 percent of all Internet searches in 2008.

While I don’t think any single platform is going to ever dominate social media like Google does search, there will be a shakeout.  In my opinion, there are four platforms and one application that will always be on top. Others that compliment those four will continue to do fine. Still others will fade away. So, as I said, don’t worry about those 150. Most of them are not going to be around in five years.

The four applications that will remain on top, and therefore should always be used are: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The platform is a blog. So, why these four and a blog?

Because by using those five tools in concert, you can build a comprehensive, effective social media campaign. Sure, they are other tools that can be used – in fact; some of will make your campaign even more effective. But, think of this like learning to fly. No one starts on a jet. You start out with a single engine plane and work your way up.

The goal of a social media campaign is to demonstrate why someone should buy your product or hire your service. They days of when a company could say: “hey, I am great. Buy my product” are gone. The public won’t go for that anymore. You are using social media strategies and tactics so your company stands out. You want outsiders to give you kudos on Linked, Facebook and your blog. You want them to highly rate your products. All of this shows others that yours is a company to be trusted.

The other thing you want is ensure when a search if conducted for your industry or business sector, your company comes up on the first two pages of Google, or any other search engine. Yeah, it looks impressive when Google returns a million results, but come on, no looks at a million results. Studies have shown that the vast majority of searchers only read the first two results page.

I am going to go more in-depth in the coming posts about why these five. But a few facts about each. It’s why I prefer to use them. These are not in order of size of use. I am ranking them more in order of what I feel is each tool effectiveness.

First, blogging is something I feel everyone using social media should do. It is not the first thing you should be doing, but it should be eventually. Why? Well, this where you most effectively demonstrate your knowledge of your subject. It is also is one of the best ways to increase your Google rankings. As your blog gains popularity, others will spread the word around the web. They will link to your blog, using such things as RSS feeds and other methods. This helps improve your rankings.

As Google itself explains it: “in general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages.”

Once you have written that blog, people need to know about it. One note about that – the first two or three blogs you write are going to be read by your family and a couple of friends. It takes times to build readership. I now have around 5,000 readers but it took me sevens months to get that to level.

That’s where Twitter enters the picture. Twitter is essentially a headline service. I know it describes itself as mini-blog site, but blogs are more than 140 characters long. You can tweet – once or twice – about your blog posting. Anymore than once or twice is a breach of web etiquette. Yes the web has etiquette rules. They are unwritten, but they exist. What you want is for your followers to pass your blog around the Twittersphere, which will bring both bring traffic to your website and increase your search rankings.Twitter is also a great site to post comments and links to relevant websites.

The next site I always recommend is LinkedIn. I often refer to it as the grown-up Facebook. LinkedIn is a site for professionals to meet with other professionals. The value of LinkedIn is the thousands of groups that members have formed. I doubt there is any industry that doesn’t have a groups there. You can do three primary things on those groups: post questions asking other members for answers, answer questions, post a link to your blog or make comments on other posts, thereby improving your credibility; and post links to your blog, website or event. Again, that increases your rankings.

The third site is Facebook. Facebook is monster of all sites. It has over 300 million users – mostly in English speaking countries. It also has a business side where you can list your company. It is hard to pass up any site of that size. It is also a great place to post links, talk about your company and find out what others are doing. My

Finally, there is YouTube. YouTube is a video-sharing site. The old cliché said that one picture is worth a thousand words. So what’s a video worth? On YouTube you can post videos of a new product, a demonstration of what your company does, or a video blog where you can post graphs, videos within the video and other information. You can create a channel on YouTube where you can aggregate all of your company’s videos.

A note about YouTube – it’s the second largest search engine. Google owns it. See what I mean about Google dominating search.

In the coming weeks, I will go more in-depth about each site, starting with blogging.

NOTE: Before we get started, I would like to invite you to join myself and five other social media experts to listen to our Blog Talk Radio show Wednesday at 8 p.m. (GMT -6). We will talk about social media and how you can use it for 60 minutes. Please join us. Just click on the link.

So let’s get to using social media in your business, as I promised last week.

The thing you should know is that social media is not a burden; it’s a gift. That’s not me talking. It comes from Paula Berg of Southwest Airlines. Berg is manager of Emerging Media for the Dallas, Texas Airlines.

Social media is also going to make corporate websites largely obsolete, Randy Sprenger, Harley-Davidson’s manger of electronic advertising and direct advertising.

Okay, let your eyebrows go down now. Both Sprenger and Berg are veteran users of all forms of social media. They work for established companies who wouldn’t involve themselves corporately in something unless they were convinced it was here to stay. Both have seen the value of marketing their companies using social media outlets such as YouTube, Facebook and blogs.

Berg and Sprenger were two of a number of speakers at the Public Relations & Social Media Summit last Wednesday (Oct. 14) at the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater. They are were a lot of fine speakers, but these two are the most relevant to what most companies today should be doing.

As an aside, I enjoyed the conference greatly. For anyone diving into social media, I recommend going to such conferences. The learning doesn’t just take place in the sessions. It also happens in the hallways, over lunch, and in the bar after it ends. You are going to get a diverse people at such an event. It is great way to meet people, trade information and learn how to solve social media problems.

From my research, I have to say that Southwest Airlines and Harley-Davidson are two of the best U.S. companies in applying social media tools to their businesses. That’s not to say that other companies are not doing very well also. But Harley and Southwest have leaped into the social media pool with both feet. They are doing this everyday and offer some valuable lessons for companies thinking about starting down the social media road.

Southwest ran a very successful fare sale using only Twitter, Berg said. Harley has its own YouTube channel for riders and would-be riders.

“My honest advice (to anyone getting started in social media) is to go home, grab a bottle or two of wine, and just sit in front of your computer for a night or for a weekend and figure it out,” Berg said after she spoke. “It is not difficult, it just takes a little bit of time. Get your rhythm and see how things work. That’s what I did. It’s taken me pretty far.”

Southwest has been using social media on a regular basis since 2006. The most important lesson Southwest has learned in using social media is speed, Berg said. Social media moves at the “speed of light.” A company using social media cannot wait, it cannot reactive, Berg said. It is important for company to get out ahead of issues with good information, she said.

Southwest has one of the best corporate blogs in the business, in my opinion. I read it as often as I can. I don’t know for sure, but I think it is one of the most popular corporate blogs. The company uses it for many things – communicating with customers, crisis communications, and as a brand platform to name some examples.

Berg said the blog taught the airline another lesson – customers want to engage with them. That’s something I tell clients all the time – their customers really want to talk. Not yell, or scold, just talk. People want to know they are being heard. As Berg pointed out, it can also be a lot fun. One of aspects of social media is breaking down barriers. It can be fun to actually to your customers or clients in a more informal way.

Harley-Davidson’s motorcycle riders have been socializing for almost as long as the company has existed, Sprenger said. That’s part of the lure of owning a Hog – the chance to hang out with people who have the same interest. Harley riders see themselves as individualists. One of Harley’s social media goals to join in with that, he explained.

“Harley-Davidson is just now adopting social media,” Sprenger told the group. I work in advertising, but I do a lot with social media. We have done a lot of leveraging of outside resources, social media agencies and search agencies.”

The motorcycle company’s first foray into social media was when an advertising agency suggested that Harley create a “Biker Claus” channel on YouTube, Sprenger said. He explained it was kind of takeoff on 2003 movie Bad Santa.

“The thing was, they wanted to do just that channel for a campaign,” Sprenger said. “A lot of advertising agencies are like that. They want to use social media as a tactic. They don’t see it as a bigger solution.”

Harley’s owners are already among the most fervent in the motorcycle world. I know that from personal experience. I live in Milwaukee, Harley’s headquarters city. I have many friends who work there and many more friends who ride Hogs. Social media is another way to link those dedicated riders. It allows them to evangelize for the brand in a larger forum.

That’s key for the motorcycle company. The average rider is aging. The company wants to lower the average age of its riders. Social media is a way to reach out to the group – mostly younger – who have rejected traditional marketing channels. So for Harley, social media is not just a tactic. It is a strategy to reach out to potential customers.

That’s what led Sprenger to decide that corporate websites are going to fade away.

“Traffic at corporate websites is trending down,” he explained. “People are no longer going to websites for information. They are using feed readers, Facebook and blogs. People will go to product pages.”

Which hammers home a point I make often, social media is changing the way marketing is done. Berg and Sprenger made the point better than I ever could.

To run a successful marketing campaign in the first part of the 21^st century means using social media. It’s a fact of business life. It is one that scares a lot of chief marketing officers and their bosses because they don’t understand how to use social media. But that doesn’t change the fact that not using social media creates the risk of your business being left behind the competition.

No one wants to have his or her company left behind. Still, the idea of switching to an entirely new marketing system is daunting. It doesn’t have to be. That’s where I come in. For the next several posts, I am going to over some of the common applications and how they can be used for public relations and marketing.

I was going to write about this last month, but I got sidetracked. It is so important – I think – that I want to come back to the subject.

Before I start, let me give you a bit of my background in social media. I started doing it three years ago when I created a podcast for a client. It wasn’t even called social media then. From there, I started attending seminar, webinars and reading everything I could on the subject. Eight months ago, I stumbled across Simon U. Ford’s in-depth social media courses and took them. They really helped. I now use social media on an everyday basis – both in business and my personal life. I am a member of the Social Media Boomers, a group of six dedicated to spreading the world about social media.

So now – first, why social media? It is because that’s where your potential customers are. If you want to see the social media usage statistics, read Lesson 25. And remember, those are slippery numbers as social media usage keeps increasing.

So, how to you reach those customers? Well, you find them by driving the search results for your company on the first two pages of Google. That’s where social media enters the picture. It is what gets you there.

Why Google? Because Google dominates search. No other search engine is close in the amount of usage. It is where over two-thirds of those around the world conduct searches go to find something. So, if someone is looking for an advertising agency, a plumber, or a doctor, chances the first place they will look is Google. Why the first two pages? Because most people will not go beyond the first two pages. Yes, it looks cool when Google returns two million results for a search term, but no one wants to take the time go beyond the first 20 or so results

Google is the best illustration of how marketing has been turned on its head by social media. It used to be companies looked for customers and seduced them into buying something. They did it my shouting, or cajoling, or making promises, or offering a deal.

Well, starting about five years, consumers turned on that kind of marketing. The power paradigm shifted. Using the Internet, people found they could talk to consumers all over the world. If a company did something that angered consumers, the entire wired world knew within about an hour. If a product was good, customers told each other.

What those customers were doing was building a community. That’s the key takeaway from this post – social media is all about building a community. These are communities that demand openness and honesty. If you don’t do that, you ain’t selling them anything.

This is another reason why I think many executives don’t like social media. It demands a lot more effort. To be successful at social media means interacting with the community that is being created. It cannot be done any outsider. A lof of executives think they don’t have the time to do that.

So, what to do? Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let’s start talking about using social media. It is going to take awhile – several weeks or more probably – but I will give you the mountaintop view.

Social media marketing expert Brian Solis developed this diagram to explain how social media marketing works. Don't worry, it is not as complicated as it looks.

The first thing to deal with is the sheer number of social media applications. If you use Google to search for social media applications you will get thousands of results.  I compare it to my first day working as a bike mechanic. I looked inside my new shiny four drawer red toolbox and wondered what the hell all of those tools were for. With their blue and yellow handles, they looked cool. But, I didn’t know a “third hand” from spoke wrench.

In the following weeks, with the help of skilled and patient teachers, I learned how to use those tools. I figured out which were essential and which were only for specialized jobs. I can now take a bike apart and put it back together the same way.

The same thing is true about all those social media applications – think of all them as tools. Some you will use constantly, others will be for specialized jobs. But, they can be used together. In fact, you should always use more than one application. As I tell clients – maybe you build a house using only a hammer, but it would be very difficult.

There are five tools you always have in your social media toolbox. The four applications are Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube. The fifth tool is blogging. Blogging is not application, although the software that allows it to happen is one. Those five – in different combinations– should always be part of any campaign.

It will be impossible to cover every social media application. Every time I think I know them all, five more pop up. So don’t try. Next week, I will talk about how to chose the applications you need for each campaign. As a preview, it boils down to quality of followers versus quantity of followers. But that’s next week.

NOTE TO MY READERS: IF YOU WANT TO REALLY LEARN SOCIAL MEDIA, GO TO THE SOCIAL MEDIA BOOMERS SITE AND CLICK THROUGH TO THE SOCIAL TRAFFIC INC. SITE. THERE YOU WILL FIND INFORMATION ABOUT THE SAME SOCIAL MEDIA COURSES I TOOK FROM SIMON U. FORD.

SECOND NOTE: FOR THOSE OF YOU WHO WANT MORE OF AN IN-DEPTH INTRODUCTION TO SOCIAL MEDIA, JOIN THE SOCIAL MEDIA BOOMERS ON BLOG TALK RADIO STARTING OCT. 21ST AT 8 P.M. CDT (GMT-6). WE WILL TALK ABOUT DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF SOCIAL MEDIA. JUST CLICK ON THE LINK TO LISTEN.

The number and kind of social media applications keeps growing. Image courtesy of Share Media

In the seven months I have been writing this blog, I have had much to say about social media and its implications for traditional marketing and public relations. What I haven’t done is talk about using social media’s. So for my next several blogs, I am going to talk about applying social media to your business. It works for both – business-to-consumer and business-to-business.

I am not talking about using Facebook to find that long lost high school sweetheart (does your spouse know you are doing that?). Or tweeting all your friends that you just made a dynamite Denver omelet. There’s nothing wrong with doing that. But to me that’s like using a Porsche Carrera to pick up milk at the corner. You are not taking social media out of first gear.

My social media mentor, Simon U. Ford, calls social media the fifth communications revolution – coming after things such as the printing press and the telephone. As Ford explains, social media is not just sharing information, it is people working together – people collaborating, about people building a community. He also argues – and I agree – that it has completely changed the mediascape.

Here’s the definition of social media definition I use in client presentations: “Social media is a set of Internet tools that enable shared community experiences, both online and offline. It allows people and companies to tell stories, build communities, sell products, build market share or reach new audiences through the use of websites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, blogs, podcasts, video podcasts (usually called Vlogs), photo sharing and wikis.”

Or put more simply: “social media is about building a collaborative community.” Yeah, I know I said that two paragraphs ago, but it needed to be said again.

The ultimate goal of social media is to bring people to your website. Once there, they can register for your event, buy your product, hire your company, recommend you, do anyone of thousand other things.

What social media does is give people reasons to go the website. Here’s the second key about using social media: you have to build trust. Think about it; are you friends with anyone you don’t trust? I don’t mean an acquaintance you have an occasional beer with. I mean someone who has demonstrated to you through his or her words and actions they are someone on which you can rely. The same thing applies to on-line communities – would you join an online community where you didn’t trust the other members? The trust could take many forms, although demonstrated expertise is always my top reason.

In social media, you attract people by demonstrating your expertise. You do that by blogging, tweeting and using other forms of social media. That’s just the first step. Once you do those things, other people have to endorse what you have done. They have to tweet about, link to it on their blogs and talk about it on their Facebook pages. I will talk about how to do that in other posts.

That is the part that many companies have problems – it means giving up control of their brand. Social media has done is turn the old equation upside down. Customers will search for the companies with which they want to deal. So, every company has to do everything it can to make sure it’s trusted.

When used properly, social media is a powerful set of tools that will outperform just about any other form of advertising or marketing. I think it is that effective. I have seen just how well it works for my clients. Check out either Sidewinder Cycles or Smart Barter USA. I have not worked with either of that long. But you can see the positive effects of social media on both their brands.

Before I go into this, I want to establish how I learned to use social media. I came to it three years ago when I created a series of podcasts for a client. They wanted to find a new way to reach employees. Email wasn’t working. The podcasts had over a 75 percent open rate, compared to the 15 percent rate for emails. I didn’t even know what I was doing was called social media. I just knew it worked.

For the next two years, I did everything I could to learn social media – which was then called Web 2.0. I read everything experts Brian Solis, Chris Brogan, Sarah Evans and other wrote.They are all very good and I learned a lot. I signed up for every social media application in existence and read their FAQs and instructions. I thought I was pretty good at it.

I didn’t know how much I had to learn until I stumbled across Ford. Ford owns a company called Eventslisted.com. He is a successful social media entrepreneur. That’s why I chose to him as a teacher. I mistrust trainers who have never actually done it themselves.

Prior to that, many people who tell me they can teach me social media in a day or a weekend have approached me. That to me is like some driving schools that say they will make you expert driver after one or two lessons. I suppose something like that happens for one in a million students. But most of us have to take the course from an expert instructor. We all need both classroom instruction and hands-on training. This is the kind of training that takes time and effort. If you don’t put in the time and put out the effort, you won’t learn much.

So, I went through Simon’s intensive 10-week social media training course. I learned how to use tools such as Twitter, Digg and YouTube. I learned a lot.

You can see how I applied what I learned by doing a couple of simple exercises:

• Google PR 101. This blog comes up in the third result.
• Google Jeff Cole, Milwaukee. I come as the first three results.
• Google Jeff Cole. I am the first result.
• If you Google my company – JJC Communications LLC – it comes up as the first four results.

I am not doing this to boast. I am writing this to prove a point. By the way, I still need to do some work. If you Google public relations and Milwaukee, I don’t come up for three pages. So, I am still learning.

Next week, we will discuss how to use some social media applications.

If you have any questions about social media, ask through a comment or email me. You can contact me through my company website: http://www.jjc-comunication.biz or email me at jjcole54@gmail.com.

NOTE TO MY READERS: If you are interested in a free, introductory course on social media, email me. Myself and five  other social media acolytes are doing the second round of a our Social Media Book Club on Blog Talk Radio We are giving away an EBook written by social media guru Simon U. Ford. Ford sold several thousand of the books for $47. However, we have permission to give it away for a limited time.We also will be holding a series of four virtual “book clubs” to go over the book. Between the book and the four of us, you will receive a comprehensive overview of social media. Because we want to provide the best possible training, there are only be 50 spots available for the book club. For more information, go to the Social Boomers site. The first show will be Wednesday, Sept. 23 at 8 pm CDT (GMT -6). The URL is bit.ly/Y253H.

If you would like a copy of the book, email jjcole54 at gmail.com. It is helpful to have.

There’s a song by the late Jim Croce where the refrain goes:

“You don’t tug on Superman’s cape.

“You don’t spit into the wind.

“You don’t pull the mask off the old Lone Ranger

“And you don’t mess around with Jim.”

© 2007 Ingrid Croce

The point of the song is that you don’t stupid things – or mess with things you know nothing about. I think that last line could be to paraphrased to: “And you don’t mess around with social media.”

ESPN, a number of pro football teams, some college football leagues, and a number of companies are messing with social media. The companies and leagues are banning fans, players and employees from using social media during games and work hours. In fact, the web security company ScanSafe has found that more companies ban the use of social media than ban weapons, according to a study it released Aug. 19.

According to Scan Safe’s study: “An analysis of more than a billion Web requests processed by the company each month confirms a 20 percent increase in the number of customers blocking social networking sites in the last six months. Currently, 76 percent of companies are choosing to block social networking and it is now a more popular category to block than online shopping (52 percent), weapons (75 percent), alcohol (64 percent), sports (51 percent) and Webmail (58 percent). Surprisingly, employers don’t take the same stern approach to online banking and less than half (47 percent) of our customers block this category.”

So, there are companies that allow their employees to drink and pack heat, but not update up their Facebook page. ScanSafe opines that companies think social media reduces productivity. Frankly, I think a three martini lunch will have a much greater effect on productivity than tweeting about what one’s dog did on his morning walk.

As for blocking social media use on the job, it is harder than it seems. While a company will know if an employee is using a company computer to access social media – what are they going to do about smart phones? If it is not a company supplied smart phone, how are corporate executives going what their employees are doing? More and more social media apps are moving onto smart phones. How is a company going to know what an employee is doing on their own smart phone?

Plus, I would want my employees to access social media to talk about my company. Several studies have shown that employees are  the best brand ambassadors. If the price to be paid for employees talking up a new product is having them look at their Facebook pages once in a while, so be it. Remember, social media is about a building a community. That community building should start with your own employees.

On another front, the NFL has banned coaches, players, other personnel, or anyone representing them, and journalists from updating their status on Twitter, Facebook or other social media during games and up to 90 minutes before and after, according to TechDirt. Referees are banned from ever using social media while the league employs them, the site said. Apparently, this stems from an online apology from a ref over a blown call. We cannot have the refs admitting they are human, now can we?

I am not sure if this applies to the NFL itself, as it has its own Twitter account. The ban does not extend to players and other personnel when they are on their own time. The NFL is understandably trying to protect its lucrative broadcast outlets. Frankly, I happen to enjoy seeing a player tweet during a game. To me, it’s better than some sideline interview done with the coach where he hands out canned responses.

(On an unrelated note, just once I want to hear the coach of team who won by a huge margin not say something like: “the game was closer than the score indicated.” What I want to hear them say is what I suspect they are thinking: “what was that other team thinking even being on the field with us today? We wiped the turf up with them.”)

What is particularly troubling to me is banning journalists from using social media during a game. A very long time ago – when print media ruled the world – sports reporters would do inning-by-inning updates of the game they were covering. These updates would be read on radios and posted in newspaper offices for people to see. If it was particularly big event, say the Dempsey-Firpo fight in 1923, a newspaper might print extra editions to tell people what was going on.

No one had a problem in those days about giving out information during a game. The practice lasted until television came along. Then there was no need for it because everyone had access.

Now, with more and more sports events moving to cable and pay-per-view, many people no longer have access. Social media is way for fans to stay in touch and feel connected to their teams. Don’t teams want people to stay in touch? Fans are no longer willing to wait until the next day – or even until the late evening news – to find out what happened.

I think this policy is going to backfire on them – as it has with so many other companies.

Companies from Comcast to United Airlines have found out the hard way what happens when you mess with social media. I think a lot of other organizations are about to find the hard way they are in a fight they cannot win – just as Big Jim Walker found out when he messed with Willie McCoy. Big Jim thought he was the toughest man on 42^nd Street, until he ran into Willie. A lot of organizations are liable to find themselves in the same fix – in a figurative way – the Big Jim did.

And when the cuttin’ were done

The only part that wasn’t bloody

Was the soles of the big man’s feet

Yeah he were cut in bout a hundred places

And he were shot in a couple more…”