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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media provides a better chance of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An interview with City University of New York Associate Professor Jeff Jarvis on National Public Radio last week actually made me pull my car over so I could listen carefully and take notes. He was talking about the French Prime Minister’s Nicholas Sarkozy’s suggestion that governments regulate the Net.

While I normally confine my blogs to marketing, public relations and social media, Jarvis reported on something that could affect all two billion Net users worldwide. So I felt I had to write about it. We all need to stand up, take notice, and in my opinion, oppose any effort by any government attempt to control the Web.

Jarvis is the university’s director of the Interactive Program and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism. Among his many accomplishments, Jarvis is a national leader in the development of online news, blogging, and other forms of collaborative journalism, blogs at Buzzmachine.com and is the is author of the book, What Would Google Do?

In short the man is an Internet expert.

Prior to the regular G-8 meeting, Sarkozy held an “e-G8” meeting to which the German news site Der Spiegel said he invited three of the world’s most powerful Internet luminaries to a forum in Paris: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google, the world’s largest search engine; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and head of Facebook, the world’s largest social-networking site, with more than 650 million users; and Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online retailer. Many other Netizans, including Jarvis, went to the event.

Incidentally, note that the power trio is all Americans.

The gist of Sarkozy wants to do is having governments control the Internet. In his view, governments have a legitimate right to regulate the Web as they are only representatives of a country’s cititzens. He argues that things such as child pornography and terrorism have to be dealt with by governments.

“More than three years ago, Sarkozy declared war on the Web,” Der Spiegel reported. “At the time, he referred to it as a “Wild West” and characterized it as an ‘extralegal zone.’ In the style of an Internet Napoleon, he announced his intention to ‘civilize the Internet.’ Since then, he has pursued regulation with nothing short of missionary zeal.”

Curiously, I saw no coverage of this in the U.S. media. I guess they were too busy eating canapés and hobnobbing with dignitaries to notice something this important.

Jarvis said he attended the meeting as an Internet citizen.

“The net is also a new society,” Jarvis wrote in a Huffington Post blog. “That idea is confounding to nations of laws because the net’s own sovereignty depends upon no one having sovereignty over it. That is how it was designed. That is its core principle.

“So it doesn’t behave like a new land that, in Sarkozy’s view, needs civilizing.”

Sarkozy’s argument about crime on the Internet is, in my view, a Trojan horse. Once government can regulate any part of the Net, it will try to regulate it all.

That’s why we has marketers should be worried. Many countries are particularly protectionist. Suppose you have a client based in Ireland that wants to market its products in Singapore. But for whatever reason, the government of Singapore decides it doesn’t want the Irish marketing in their country. If they can control the Net, they can block any attempt by that Irish company to market its wares. Do you want a government telling you how you can market?

Give a government official control of the Net and free access to information will end. Frankly, I think governments are worried that the Internet is causing them to lose control. If they cannot control the sources of information, they have less control over their people.

Think about the Arab Spring. It was pushed and helped by the Internet. Think about what China and other repressive countries would do if their efforts stifle free expression were granted legitimacy.

We all need to oppose what Sarkozy is doing. He says he is just trying to help.

I am not a big believer in anyone offering to help me if I don’t ask for it. As Henry David Thoreau said: “If I knew for a certainty that a man was coming to my house with the conscious design of doing me good, I should run for my life.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Therein lies the conundrum for many of us. We can write compelling blogs, post interesting tweets, make fascinating videos, add to LinkedIn discussions, and draw people to our Facebook pages. But a lot of us couldn’t sell long underwear to Alaskan oil field workers in the middle of a January blizzard. We have forgotten to acquire that the one key skill that ensures that a business or agency will be successful – sales.

I used to be as bad as sales as anyone. I can do everything I just wrote about and then some. But when it came time to convince someone else that they needed to the same to make their business prosper, well just remember that shivering oil field worker.

Just because we know social media is going to dominate marketing doesn’t mean our prospective clients know or care. They need to shown and convinced why that is so. Too often we social media evangelists make the same mistakes other enthusiasts make: we assume that everyone shares our fervor. Well, that just isn’t true.

I have heard many stories of an internal marketing manager or an agency representative charging into the CMO’s office enthusing all over the place about social media. Done that way the usual result is the CMO tells the interloper to clear out and take the enthusiasm with them. Oh they might be polite about it and all, but they never call back.

You can’t go fishing with a shotgun and you cannot convince someone to buy something based on your attitude. Just like in fishing, you have to be patient. You have to have the right bait and you have to convince the prospect to rise to that bait. That is the only way to do it.

Using pull marketing tactics is how it is done correctly. As a refresher, pull marketing is a method in which you give a potential customer convincing reasons to buy something. You don’t force anything. You let them take their time and make a decision. That goes for both external and internal clients.

Second, you have to make sure you are targeting the right prospects. I have seen too many agencies use the “any company is a good client approach.” I know it is tough in a recession not to go after just about any business. But ultimately you will fail doing that. It is much better to pick out a market niche and target it. Set up criteria for which companies within that niche would be your ideal client and go after that group.

If you are inside a company, you have to make sure you trying to convince the people who actually the decisions. Generally, that would be people in the C-Suite. But be careful to pay attention to internal politics. Don’t bypass someone who has the power to stop you from achieving your goal. Rather get them to buy into your idea.

I once had an editor who would almost automatically turn any idea a reporter had. I don’t know whether he was insecure, busy, or just arrogant. What reporters learned to do was have a general discussion with this editor about the area in which they wanted to do a story. They would then let the editor has the “light bulb” moment and assign them the story.

The same tactic can work with the people you are trying to convince. Not that anyone’s superiors are insecure, busy or arrogant.

The bottom line is before you write that blog post or post that video, you have to convince people that it will work. Only then can you get the camera out and start shooting.

What the Brewers did and didn’t do is also a lesson for any marketer who has an idea that seems to be a surefire winner. I am willing to bet no one in planning the promotion that backfired asked “what if … goes wrong.” Until you think something through from every angle, you are asking for trouble. As the Chinese military thinker Sun Tzu said: “The general who loses a battle makes but few calculations beforehand.”

Here’s what happened to the Brewers. As a promotion, the team placed 1,400 statues of mascot Bernie Brewer across Wisconsin parks early Tuesday morning. Some of the statues had a prize attached, including ticket vouchers, player autographs, and merchandise.

The idea was Bernie would tweet clues to the location of each statue so fans could find them. Under the rules, the contest was to begin at 7 a.m. People were supposed to take only one of the statutes. It didn’t work out that way.

Instead, people were grabbing as many as possible. There were reports of people sleeping in their cars overnight near parks where the statutes were to be placed. One woman tweeted she had taken over three dozen. People were trying to sell the statutes on EBay and Craigslist. This caused a lot of angry comments from people who tried to follow the rules.

Clearly no one at the Brewers thought this thing through. This is a clear case I feel of “you know what would be cool?” No one in the meeting asked the “what if fans get greedy and take more than one” question.  It’s a cliché, but it’s true: “hope for the best, but plan for the worst.”

There are hundreds of comments on social media sites posted by angry fans. The story went viral. I read a lot of the comments. People are really angry or laughing at the Brewers. Neither is good. The fact that the Brewers insisted that promotion went mostly okay shows me they don’t understand the power of social media.

Where the Brewers failed was not taking human nature into account. You announce you are giving away for free something people want they are going to find ways to game the system. Once the idea of the giveaway was decided on, the next topic of discussion should have been how to prevent the hoarding.

Brewers spokesman said the promotion went well with the exception of “some isolated” incidents. Wrong. They should have apologized profusely. That’s crisis communications 101.

What should the Brewers have done, or more accurately what would I have done?

First, there would have been no actual tickets, merchandise or autographed items in the statues if I were running things. What there would have been were vouchers for those items. Stamped on each voucher would be the words “One Prize Per Address or Family.” No, it wouldn’t have completely stopped the hoarding. But it would have cut down on it.

Second, I would have implanted a locator chip in each Bernie statue. Once I saw that more than Bernie was in one location, I would have noted the IDs on the chips (yes, the technology exists.) Whoever brought any of those hoarded statues in for redemption would have been disqualified automatically.

Third, to prevent anyone from selling the statutes on EBay or Craigslist, I would make it very public that the statutes can be purchased from the Brewers for $48. That would kill that market.

Fourth, I would have made those statues a heck of lot harder to find. Scavenger hunts are not supposed to be easy.

Now it is true that the people who thought they would corner the Bernie Brewer statue market are not particularly ethical or honest. But that’s human nature.

The failure was with the Brewers and their planning. You have to think these things through. It is why the first thing JJC Communications LLC does with a new client is an analysis what could go right and what could wrong. If you only do one of those, you end up with a lot of angry fans and people laughing at you.

If you want to learn more about how to such an analysis, let me know.

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

This is what I said in reply to the request:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

First, it is wrong, and frankly almost impossible, to block employees from using social media use during work hours. As a social media agency, the people who work at JJC Communications are supposed to be using social media. It is one of the things we do for clients, so we be better be doing it.

Yes, you can block access to any site on your company’s system. But if your employees have their own smart phones; they have access during the day. Or they can just go home at night and say what they want. As technology advances, it is getting easier and easier for them to do it anonymously. Better to have them do it where you can monitor what they do.

Actually, a lot of good can come from allowing your employees access to the Internet. Your employees are your brand ambassadors. They have much more credibility with the general public than your advertising ever will. When I see an employee using their company’s products, I assume they take pride in what they do. That’s a powerful selling point.

There is fear among a lot of senior executives about letting their people access Facebook, or Tweet, do something else during work hours. There are concerns it will turn into a timewaster, an employee will reveal some company secret, or get the company in legal trouble.

Let me deal with those three:

• Show me an employee who doesn’t waste at least some time doing something other than work. In my time, I have run fantasy baseball pools; participated in chair races; figured out my NCAA pool entries and done a dozen other things that would not be considered productive labor. Wouldn’t you rather your employee posting something good about your company instead of playing Angry Birds?
• Every company who allows Internet access has to have – let me repeat that – has to have a manual for Internet use. The U.S. Air Force’s policy is that if a 19-year-old is old enough to die for their country, he or she is old enough to blog or use Facebook. However, each member of the Air Force is issued a manual that covers the do’s and don’ts of Internet use. Break any of those rules and an Airman will have serious explaining to do to their commanding officer.
• As for legal trouble, it is true the Internet is the Wild West of the law. How do you deal with a situation where your employee rips a company in Singapore? That employee might have violated the law in Singapore, but not in the United States. Where do the various doctrines of U.S. law enter the picture? My feeling that Internet is going end up being governed by something akin to Admiralty law, which determines the rule for the oceans. At any rate, here I always urge clients to error on the sign of caution. Make sure that Internet use manual includes a section on U.S. law.

One more thing about the manual. As part of any employee orientation, spend some time going over your Internet policy. Make sure every employee signs something acknowledging they know and understand the policy.

We at the agency do not allow completely open access. Accessing any pornographic, racist, or extremist sites is going to get an employee into a whole heap of trouble. People are told that when they get hired. We monitor those kinds of things. Of course, there is no criticizing clients publically. That would obviously be counterproductive. There is no revealing anything we are working on until we are ready to make it public.

In addition, there is no discussing any other employee either internally or externally. We also expect employees not libel or slander anyone. The AP Stylebook has an excellent section on libel and slander.

We have other rules, but they are designed to make things clearer, not more difficult.

The bottom line is that the Internet is something that never sleeps, never stops and is always accessible. It better to learn how to swim then forbid your employees to jump into the water. Remember, forbidden fruit, and forbidden access, just makes people want something more.

Doing branding so it’s effective means melding traditional media, public relations and social media. Using just one of those methods might be effective in creating a brand. While there are never any guarantees, using the three methods as a trio greatly increases the chances that your product will resonate with potential customers.

Remember, a brand does not exist until it is fixed in a customers mind. Until then it is just something up shelf space.

So, what do you to meld the three? Well, the first thing is to sit down with the client and discuss their goals. Then take a deep breath and do that client sanity check I have talked about. One you have realistic goals, write a plan.

This is what I do. I sit down with a client and talk. We hammer out what is unique about the product or the client themselves. This is important for doing traditional media. You need a hook, something that will make a journalist take interest in the story.

Make no mistake; traditional media should still be in the mix. By that I mean free media. There is no need to buy an ad in a publication or spend thousands of dollars for a broadcast. Those efforts rarely, if ever, resonate with a consumer anymore. Yes, there was a time when they did, but there was also a time when people had to start their car with a crank.

If you convince a journalist to write or broadcast a story about a product, that is a huge endorsement. I think print journalism still has come cachet with consumers, especially those over 50. Yes, print is dying, but it’s not dead yet.

The same goes for broadcast, only more so. With the rise of DVRs, fewer and fewer people are watching commercials. But every study I have seen shows they are still watching local news. A piece of local news is another good way to build a brand. Most local news shows still have credibility.

Of course, that is only leg of the marketing stool. Social media has to be part of the plan – in fact it should lead the plan. The tools are many and should be used in tandem with traditional marketing methods.

I usually start my clients out with blogging. Every study I’ve ever read shows blogging is the best way to build credibility. Remember, a blog is not a sales document. It is a way to build credibility. No one is going to think a product is credible if the company making it is not viewed that way.

What a blog is a way to demonstrate expertise and ability. No one likes it when a company thumps its own chest. What readers do like is when a blog provides answers to questions or solutions to problems or just general knowledge.

A blog is also good for monitoring what customers think. I know I continually hammer on this point, but you want to hear both the good and the bad comments. The good can be used to help build the brand; the bad can help correct mistakes.

Facebook pages can be used the same way. Twitter is a billboard that allows you to tell people wants going on with your product. YouTube is invaluable for actually showing people what a product does.

Then there are such things as trade shows, samples and all that other good stuff. I could write a complete blog on each of these items. But enough for now.

Next week I want to talk about once cutting edge marketing vehicles that no longer work.

Well, I give you a hint. It all has to with Word of Mouth or WOM. If content is king, then WOM is queen.

Since I prefer to work with small and medium-sized companies, the question usually comes from the owner, the chief executive officer, or the chief marketing officer. It is a legitimate question. After all, I am usually presenting plans that can run into the five figures in costs. (I am not a cheap date. But, I am a highly effective one.)

Many of these companies are going to be marketing for the first time in their existence. They have moved beyond the startup phase. To keep growing, they know it’s time to start reaching out to potential customers.

The men and women who started these companies are engineers, lawyers, carpenters, or bakers. So far ROI has been something measurable. They know if they buy X amount of lumber or flour, they will produce Y amount of product. They can usually calculate their ROI after adding in their other production costs.

Marketing is different. There is a product – more customers and hence more profit. But that’s not something stamped out in a factory. These entrepreneurs are now dealing with something more ethereal – a decision by a potential customer to buy their product. These company owners would like a guarantee that what they invest will provide returns. It is a bet that makes them nervous.

It is true there is a certain amount of gambling in every company. You never really know – even after you do your primary and secondary research – whether the product is going to sell. It is only after the doors are open and hopefully the customers come in that you know your efforts were successful.

That’s the first measure of marketing – the first ROI check off. Are customers finding your business and checking it out?

Keeping those customers coming through the door is where people such as myself enter the picture. It is our job to show customers where the door is and give them reasons to through.

A caveat: I always tell potential clients; marketing doesn’t sell the product. That’s up to the company’s employees. Now, if the job is done right, the potential customer will be strongly leaning toward buying your product or service. I will everything I can to make the customer contact’s job as easy as possible. I will plow the ground and plant the seed. You just have to make it grow.

How is that done? As I said in the beginning – word of mouth or WOM. At its simplest level, word of mouth is simply Jane telling John to buy a particular product or use a certain service because she had a positive experience. What social media has done is amplify Jane’s voice so she can hundreds of people about her positive experience.

WOM is the most powerful way to market a product. According to Forrester Research, there are currently an estimated 500 billion WOM annual web impressions. Several studies have found that WOM is the most trusted form of marketing.

Research has shown that for every $1 spent on creating brand advocates there is a $10 return in positive WOM and sales. The Harvard Business Review found a ratio of 1-to-12 ROI for positive WOM. That was twice the return for any other marketing method.

That’s why social media is so effective. It generates that positive WOM and sales through third party endorsements and conversations. It does that with blogs, Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, Linkedin discussion, videos and other social media applications.

So the ROI is there. And social media is the way to generate it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

However, if the complaint is dealt with correctly, the wronged party can quickly become an advocate. I always tell clients that’s why they want to hear the complaints. It gives their business an opportunity to shine. You need to empower all of your employees to be able to take positive action in the face of a crisis because they are usually the ones dealing with the complainer.

Waiting even a couple of hours to fix problem may be too late. The damage may be permanent. Then you are facing an angry customer who might be telling the world not to use your product or go to your business. Ask Groupon, United Airlines, Proctor & Gamble or a number of other businesses what happens when a customer complaint is ignored.

A restaurant I was at Saturday night faced that situation. I was the angry customer. I like to think I am savvy when it comes to Social Media. I was fully prepared to jump on-line and use my social media accounts to rip this place a new one. But the manager turned me from that angry customer into an advocate.

The restaurant in question is named Trocadero. It is one my wife’s and my favorite places. It is funky place that serves French influenced food. We have been going there for a long time. It was one of the early leaders in turning Milwaukee from a beer and brat city to the Foodie town it is today.

So here is the scenario. My wife and I were going to the theater with another couple. No, not a movie, an actual performance. Milwaukee also has a ton of live theater.

At any rate, the performance was to begin at 7:30 p.m. The four of us arrived at Trocadero at 5:45 p.m. and were seated immediately. We figured that we would be eating by 6:15 p.m. and leaving by 7 p.m. But it didn’t work out that way.

The restaurant was packed. Milwaukee has a pretty lively weekend scene. There was a lot going on Saturday night in the downtown area.

The waitress was busy, which didn’t bother us. She took our order at about 6 p.m. We told her we had theater tickets and needed to leave by 7 p.m. She was quick with everything she had control over, primarily our drink orders. So far, so good.

However, we didn’t get our food until around 6:50 p.m. Not good. We were about 15 minutes from the theater, plus we had to find parking once we got there. None of us were happy. The waitress knew that, but it wasn’t her fault, it was the kitchen’s.

Personal note, in high school and college my son worked in a number of restaurants. For a while he considered being a chef. So, I know how restaurants operate.

At this point, the manager walked by and asked how things were. I told her. Now, she could have said something to the effect that we are sorry about the slow order, but that’s just way things were. Then the tone of this blog would have been very different.

Instead, she knocked 20 percent off the bill and apologized. She explained that the kitchen was overwhelmed by the rush. She said she hoped this one experience hadn’t soured us on Trocadero.

She also took responsibility for the problem. Now, she doesn’t work in the kitchen. But she still said it was her fault. That’s a key leadership lesson. If you are the captain, you take the blame. You give the credit to the people working for you when things go well.

Because of this woman, I recommend if you are in Milwaukee, go to Trocadero. I think you will like it.

You see, what this person did was turn a negative into a positive. She saw a problem and she dealt with immediately. That’s how you build loyal customers.

The discount site Groupon ran a commercial during the American football championship game – the Super Bowl – Feb. 6 that appeared to start out as an appeal to help Tibet. It ended as an appeal to use Groupon’s service. Actor Timothy Hutton noted that while Tibet may be an oppressed country, a Tibetan restaurant in Chicago makes a great fish curry.

To me this a case of where a campaign was created in a vacuum with no thought of how the real world would react. Of what I have read of Groupon, its management and employees are 20 and 30-somethings. I think they, along the creatives at Crispin Porter + Bogusky, found the idea hilarious. But there should have been some adult supervision. This stab at humor ended up costing Groupon a lot of good will and might have opened the door for its competitors. They went for edgy and ended up cutting themselves.

It was so controversial that Chicago-based Groupon pulled it on Friday, Feb. 11.

“We hate that we offended people, and we’re very sorry that we did – it’s the last thing we wanted,” Groupon CEO Andrew Mason wrote in the company’s blog. “We’ve listened to your feedback, and since we don’t see the point in continuing to anger people, we’re pulling the ads (a few may run again tomorrow – pulling ads immediately is sometimes impossible). We will run something less polarizing instead. We thought we were poking fun at ourselves, but clearly the execution was off and the joke didn’t come through. I personally take responsibility; although we worked with a professional ad agency, in the end, it was my decision to run the ads.”

This brings to mind that cliche about closing the barn door and the horse. I do give Mason points for taking the blame. Many CEOs wouldn’t do that.

To me, the commercial was at best juvenile and at worst offensive. Watch it yourself and see what you think.

Groupon\’s Tibet Commercial

(Full disclosure: I am Groupon member and user. I was an early adopter.)

Groupon ran two other commercials: one about saving the whales and one about saving the rainforest. Although those two were also spoofs, neither appears to have raised the public’s ire like the Tibet commercial.

The Net lit up almost immediately with criticism. Twitter users called it tacky, vulgar, detestable and other things I cannot use if I want this blog read in offices. Articles in various marketing publications condemned as a wrong-footed move for a company that until now has had a misstep.

The Chicago Tribune reported that Chicago marketing company Alterian, which measures social media activity around Super Bowl advertisers, found that Groupon had the most mentions of every advertiser, but ranked last in sentiment on Alterian’s index.

“Groupon far and away had the most negative conversations relative to its (total) number of conversations,” Scott Briggs, who headed Alterian’s study, told the Tribune.

An AdWeek online column headline called the spot “Bad Taste, Pure and Simple.”

Dallas, Texas agency Team MutualMind and students from the Temerlin  Advertising Institute at Southern Methodist University worked together to monitor the social media buzz for 52 advertisements aired during Super Bowl XLV. Their analysis found that the Groupon commercial was the most disliked of the commercials it analyzed. It was mentioned on social media sites 25,421 times. Of those mentions, 54.9 percent were negative, while 13.8 percent were positive. Presumably the remaining 31.3 percent were neutral.

According to published reports, Groupon intended the campaign to be a send-up of the pompous, self-important public service ads that run on television. More importantly, the company said it was actually trying to raise awareness for important causes.

There were defenders of the ad. I myself got involved in a very spirited debate on Linkedin in which a defender said: “The reason this campaign may have hurt Groupon has very little to do with Groupon and more to do with folks who didn’t get the joke. That is again, on them.

“Groupon was very effective in brand recognition and building awareness and resonating with those who did get it. That’s a win. That some news outlets weren’t informed and missed the point is rather sad imo, because I personally get offended more by the fact that so many are more concerned about an ad than Tibet. That’s the point.”

MSNBC commentator Lawrence O’Donnell also strongly defended the commercial. You can watch what he had to say here.

However, I do have to take issue with something O’Donnell said. He noted that Groupon gave over two-thirds of the commercial over to trying to tell people about Tibet. Well VW gave two-thirds of its time to Star Wars, but I don’t VW was trying to tout the movie.

The argument was made to me that any publicity is good publicity. Balderdash. I would never want to walk into a client meeting and tell the client: “hey guess what. We are the most mentioned campaign on the web. Everybody hates us, but look at all the mentions.” You think Toyota was thrilled by all the publicity it got last year?

This commercial was so off, it even details wrong. Tibetans don’t make or eat fish curry. According to the New York Times, the purported Tibetan mountain used in the commercial is in India, not Tibet. I mean, come on, if the details are wrong, why should I believe anything else about the commercial?

I think Groupon made a huge mistake. I want to know what you think. Please make a comment. I will do a follow-up blog if I get enough comments.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no alternative, no other option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HowHH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am working with a new client who made a major announcement last week. My first instinct was to go the social media entirely -I was going to ignore the traditional public relations channels. The decision was up to me alone. The client had put himself and his company completely in my hands.

There wasn’t a lot of time to plan for this – the things that needed to happen so this announcement could be made coalesced very quickly. The client had come to me shortly before the announcement was to be made. We wanted to make sure the client’s competitors didn’t preempt our announcement with one of their own. So we had to move quickly.

As an aside, I will never, ever reveal the name of a client unless I have their permission and I think it serves a strategic purpose. I detest marketing people who put themselves out front of their clients. They are not serving the client’s interest, they are serving their own. A client should always come first. The best marketing people leave no traces. I will have more to say about that Wednesday.

I am a planner. Before I do anything for a client, I do as comprehensive a plan as possible. It lays out what the issues are and how I think the client’s goals can be reached. I always collaborate with the client on the plan to ensures everyone knows the destination and how we’ll get there.

In this case, I had about 24 hours to do a plan and get it approved. As I am a social media maven, I was planning use the usual social media tools – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube and other sites. I was also planning to use PitchEngine, the best social media news site on the web.

As I thought about it though, I realized I should not ignore traditional media, especially television. I also added newspapers into the mix.

I added television because viewership of television stations, especially local news, is holding steady, and in some cases rising. It is an efficient, cost effective way to reach the desired audience. Yes, it is a shotgun approach, but as long the desired audience is hit, who cares?

Newspapers were added because of their websites. Yes, print circulation is dropping at almost every daily publication in the United States and around the world. However, web traffic to most news sites is rising. It is a good way to reach out to that same desired audience.

In addition, web mentions increase search rankings so it makes sense to talk to a newspaper. The story is going to placed on their website and the same is true for television stations. Their videos are usually posted on their websites.

Remember, the more mentions of a particular story, the higher the Google ranking. So, why would someone ignore such an obvious way to increase those rankings?

It is very effective to generate publicity through a combination of traditional and social media marketing strategies. Blanketing the traditional public relations and social media channels hits both targeted and broad audiences alike. That in turn stretches a client dollars to their fullest potential. It is the most effective, efficient way to ensure success.

Bloggers note: It is due to the editing skill of Heather Asiyanbi that this blog has no errors in grammar and no typos. If any crept in, it is my fault for tinkering after the blog was edited.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, if you are a regular reader of this blog, you know I constantly preach about being careful about what you post. I know of companies that require access to a potential employee’s Facebook page, Twitter stream and anything else the person has posted. Do you want a potential employer seeing those pictures of you drinking from a beer bong or making obscene gestures? I also know of companies that have refused to hire a candidate because of something they found on one of those social media sites.

The person I was talking to works in staffing. His company has been very successful in placing employees in many, many companies. He gave me examples of very qualified employees who lost on a job because of one stupid thing they posted. What particularly rankled him is that the post might have been made five years ago. As he rightly pointed out, people change and mature. The person may have changed completely, but is now haunted by something they did five years ago.

He also pointed out all of the information that be gathered about someone can be misinterpreted and misused. For instance, the state of Wisconsin maintains a website known as the Wisconsin Circuit Court Access Program. It is commonly known as CCAP. What it is a list of every infraction committed by Wisconsin residents from speeding tickets to first-degree murder. It also lists divorces and other civil matters. It does not list juvenile offenses.

The staffing guy pointed out that a listing on CCAP can follow someone around for life – even if they were acquitted of the charges. He said most people either don’t read the entire entry, or don’t understand how to read it. So they don’t see that the charges were dropped. Instead, they just assume that the person is a criminal.

He made another point I found salient. If someone did commit a crime, how long do we hold that against them? I agree with that. The point of incarceration is to punish someone first and then to rehabilitate them. So once they have served their sentence and been punished, is it fair to keep punishing them by not hiring them or ostracizing them.

Now mind you, I am not talking about all of those convicted of a crime. There are some offenses are so heinous that those who committed them should never be allowed back in society. I put sex offenders, child molesters and violent criminals in that group. I would also add in those who run large criminal organizations, such as drug dealers.

To me though, it makes sense to hire people who have “paid their debt to society.” You don’t want them committing more crimes do you? That is what they are going to do if they cannot get a legitimate job. Sometimes it is a matter of survival.

The problem is that social media makes it harder for some of those people to come back into society. The information is just too easy to access. Unfortunately too many employees are just too nervous to hire someone who they find might have committed an infraction 10 or 15 years ago. It’s too easy to find that information out now.

Is that fair? I don’t think so. What I think needs to happen is greater education and some redaction of information. I don’t see anything wrong with that, do you?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is SEO? It is a process where key words and links are used to ensure a website shows up on the first two pages of a search engine. Very few people look beyond those first two pages. It might look cool to see that Google found over million search results that matched your search. But so what. No one has the time or inclination to check more than two pages. So it is on those first two pages that you want to your website to appear.

SEO is especially important if you are small businessperson with a limited marketing budget. I don’t know of any marketplace that is not extremely competitive. SEO will help you stand out from your competition by getting your business on those first two pages of the search results.

SEO costs little, if any, money. Probably less than those billboards the farmer put up. There are many tools out there to help you determine which words should go into your copy to ensure better search results. Google has a free one and there are others.

There is also no need to pay for key words. The largest issue with doing that is once you stop paying, your ranking drops back to what it was. Whereas if you do it organically, your rankings will stay in place.

Injecting SEO into a business should start with your website’s design. When you hire a design firm, make sure they know what SEO is and how to incorporate into the website. You should do this anyway, but ask for the names of the some of the design firm’s client to find out how successful previous designs were.

Let me give you an anecdote I use when I speak on social media explaining why SEO is so important. It explains SEO very well. It goes like this:

There was vegetable farmer who had a very profitable business selling his produce from a stand at his farm. Because this farm was out in the country, the farmer placed billboards advertising the stand along the Interstate highway.

Sales were so good the farmer sent all his children to college. His oldest daughter earned both a B.A. and an M.B.A.

One summer the vegetable business dropped off. The farmer had to cut costs to stay profitable. He asked his MBA daughter what needed to be down.

She did an analysis. What made sense to her to cut were those billboards. The cost of maintaining them was dragging profits down. Why were they needed, she thought. People knew about the farm and would continue to come.

Within a month of taking the billboards down what had been downturn turned into a disaster. The customers stopped coming. So the farmer sent his daughter off to a city job and put the billboards back up. Business returned to normal.

Just think of SEO has an Internet billboard telling potential customers about your business.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You can follow me on Facebook at Jeffrey Cole.

That is changing however.

“It was probably inevitable, but we have seen a steady growth in litigation over content on the Internet,” Sandra Baron, executive director of the Media Law Resource Center in New York, told the Los Angeles Times

“Although bloggers may have a free-speech right to say what they want online, courts have found that they are not protected from being sued for their comments, even if they are posted anonymously. Some postings have even led to criminal charges,” the LA Times reported.

This is my rant for this week. Just because you have a laptop and an Internet connection does not mean you can ignore the rules.  As many bloggers are now finding out, pretending those laws don’t apply get them into a whole heap of trouble.

Yet for some reason many bloggers continue to act like they can write and say what they want. There is something about the Internet and the feeling of anonymity that leads people to write things they would never say in person.

What also bothers me is that many blogger could not define libel if it bit them on the butt.

Here for your edification is the definition of libel from the Associated Press Style Book: “at its most basic, libel means injury to reputation. In some states libel is distinguished from slander, in that a libel is written or otherwise printed, whereas slander is spoken; in either case, the word defamation generally includes both terms. Words, pictures, cartoons, photo captions and headlines can all give rise to a claim for a libel.”

One of the very first things drilled into every rookie reporter are the rules of libel. Lawsuits are expensive. Editors don’t like to use their budgets on legal fees.

“Most people have no idea of the liability they face when they publish something online,” Eric Goldman, who teaches Internet law at Santa Clara University, told the LA Times. “A whole new generation can publish now, but they don’t understand the legal dangers they could face. People are shocked to learn they can be sued for posting something that says, ‘My dentist stinks.’”

Under federal law, websites generally are not liable for comments posted by outsiders. They can, however, be forced to reveal the poster’s identity if the post includes false information presented as fact.

That’s right, you cannot hide behind a false identity. Keep in mind that to everyone at your Internet Service provider – with the exception to those who send you the bill – you are a series of numbers. Those numbers are unique and cannot be changed by you. In other words, they can identify you quite easily.

“There’s a false sense of safety on the Internet,” Kimberley Isbell, a lawyer for the Citizen Media Law Project at Harvard University said to the Times. “If you think you can be anonymous, you may not exercise the same judgment” before posting a comment, she said.

So, think before you hit that publish button.

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

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

Nope, Nyet, Nein.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which brings to why marketers should care about this.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This scares me. It should scare you too.

Still, although they are late to board, the institutions of higher learning haven’t missed the social media train,  a recent study found.

The study, “Marketing Spending at Colleges and Universities” found that higher education institutions’ interactive and social media budgets are increasing. Between fiscal year 2008 and fiscal year 2009, 55 percent of the institutions allocated more of their budgets to interactive media and 52 percent allocated more to social media.

The study was conducted by the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) and Lipman Hearne, a marketing communications firm with offices in Chicago and Washington, D.C.

“People really want to know what kids are reading and how they spend their free time – what is capturing their attention,” Lipman Hearne’s COO and director of research, Donna Van De Water is quoted in the report. “They’re trying to figure out what kinds of communications should move from print to the web. And they’re wondering what kind of language to use. They’re asking, “Should we use a student voice or our own voice?”

It is important to remember almost college students first used every social media application I know of. Student, for goodness sakes, developed Facebook at Harvard for use by other students.

Yet, colleges and universities are just now catching onto the fact that they need to be recruiting using social media?

Of course, people who demand facts and figures run most universities. They want definite empirical proof that something is working. The study does bear that out. It found that institutions that use social media report positive incomes in website hits, search engine positioning and, most importantly, rates of alumni donations.

The study also found something that should be music to a university comptroller’s ears: moderate-to-heavy users of social media spend less per student on marketing. The moderate-to-heavy users spent an average of $83 per student as opposed to the $121 per student that light-to-non-users of social media spent. In addition, 71 percent of those institutions who invested in market research and strategy reported those efforts have a positive effect on the quality of their applicants.

“Students tend to say that they want to hear the university’s voice,” Van De Water said.  “Students know if they’re being talked down to, or if their own voices are being mimicked. That said they still do want to hear a student’s perspective. So an institution needs to know what its own voice is, yet also allow students to represent the authentic student voice. Alumni want to hear a range of voices: faculty, students, other alumni, and the university’s. They understand and appreciate the complexity of the institution and welcome the various perspectives.”

In addition, the increasing use of social media has allowed colleges and universities to cut the amount of money they spend on traditional advertising. Of those institutions that are moderate-to-heavy users of social media, 42 percent spent less on traditional advertising in fiscal year 2009 than in the previous year. Of the overall survey group, approximately one-third spent less on traditional advertising than in the previous year.

So as I long as I am continuing in cliché mode, I guess it is better late than never.

I had an amazing response to the two-part guest blog on why executives hate social media. My weekly readership more than doubled. I did have a few complaints that it was too long or needed better editing. Both are good points.

Nonetheless, it raised a lot of provocative points about the C Suite and social media. I appreciate that all of you took time to read through it. Plus, I had a lot of comments. It was a good debate. Thank you all.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the Internet is heading the same way. In fact, it has already started. YouTube used to allow anyone to post anything – including copyrighted material. No one sued for the simple reason that YouTube had no money. When Google purchased YouTube, all of the copyrighted material was taken down. The reason for the reversal was simple. Google has lots of money. Pots of money as big Google has make litigators drool. Google knew the owners of those copyrights would come after them.

Companies and organizations work very hard to build and maintain their brands. Those organizations want to maintain as much control over what they created. They don’t want their messages distorted by an outsider, no matter well meaning that outsider might be.

Plus, those logos mean money. Why do you think an official league jersey costs so much? Everybody gets a cut.

Now I know the social media argument about companies having to be willing to give up some control of their image. I make those arguments and I understand their relevancy. It reflects the major change that is happening in marketing – companies no longer can rely on looking for customers, customers have to find them.

More and more businesses get that. They understand they have to provide the right offerings to attract their customers. However, more and more companies and organizations are also drawing lines about what the public can use.

Like any sports fan, I have joined Facebook pages of the teams I back. I looked at some of those pages. On a fan page for the Green Bay Packers, there is the Packers helmet. I cannot tell if the site is blessed by the Packers. I don’t know if the people who created the page realize this, but the Green Bay Packer “G” logo is trademarked.

This is nothing new, by the way. When George Halas founded the Chicago Bears right after World War I, he paid Carroll College in Waukesha, Wis. $100 to be allowed to use the now famous Bears’ “C.” It was Carroll’s logo first, they owned the rights, and Halas had to get permission to use it.

Now, I realize that much of the use of logos, trademarks and other such things is often perfectly innocent. Fans just want to show how much they love their team or their automobile. The law does not make that distinction though.

What has saved both groups, so far, is that the Internet has been the Wild West of the law. Meaning currently there is not a lot of law governing this kind of thing. But there will be. Eventually, national and international courts will establish guidelines on the use of logos and other proprietary material. Treaties will be negotiated and boundaries will be drawn.

Like the Wild West, eventually the Internet will be plowed, fenced and “civilized.” The free range will be taken away.

My wife and I get a lot of emails – both personal and professional. Between us, we have four addresses. I am talking about receiving perhaps 200 message a day or more. Many of them are for me. I monitor a lot of different social media trends and belong to a lot of different sites. I follow those sites via either RSS feed or email.

There is no problem with that part of my email load. In fact, most of the professional sites to which I belong has policies limiting themselves to one message a week or one a day. What bothers me is the retailers to whom I have given my email address.

I am a very picky about where I shop and what I buy. I have rules about comfort, style and ingredients. As much as possible, my wife and I shop at stores headquartered in Milwaukee or Wisconsin. Because Wisconsin produces everything from cheese to underwear to cleaning products, it isn’t hard.

We also tend to be loyal to the companies who produce what we view as good things. Because of that, we follow those companies on their social media sites. We also used to sign up for their email lists. We don’t do that so much anymore.

Why? Because these retailers don’t seem to understand there’s a limit to how many emails should be sent. It get’s very annoying very quickly. What’s really annoying is when the same retailer sends multiple copies of the same email. I know this is an automated marketing tool these retailers use. I also know that times are tough for retailers right now. I know they are desperate to drum up business anyway they can. The recession has hit them particularly hard.

I also know they are not going to dig themselves out of it by annoying their customers. I get so many emails from some of them that my spam filter kicks in. That’s annoying because I then have to go through my spam filter to sort through the messages.

I know these retailers are not spammers. They are not trying to sell me a timeshare in Kuala Lumpur or tell me I won the Irish lottery. (Don’t ever try that last one on someone who knows Ireland. It ain’t gonna work. My grandfather used to buy me Irish lottery tickets. I know how the Irish lottery works.) Yet, sometimes they act like spammers – they send out multiple emails each week trying to get me to buy something.

I try to be a careful shopper. I check online reviews, talk to friends, and compare prices. I am a very good collector of information. I don’t need five emails in one week from a retailer.

What usually ends up happening is that I will skim the message line. If it doesn’t grab my attention right away, I just delete the email. It never gets opened. I am way too busy building my business. I don’t have time to wade through 20 or 30 emails from companies that want me to buy something.

That means the company loses a sale. I suspect I am not alone in this.

As a note, the Southeastern Wisconsin Chapter of the Public Relations Society of America put on the panel discussion. I am a member of the Milwaukee-based chapter. I am also a member of the chapter’s Social Media Committee. Many of the chapter’s of the members are beginning to explore social media. A few, like me, have jumped in headfirst.

The presentations were well done. As I worked in the Milwaukee media market for two decades, I know those people. The panelists were from the local NBC affiliate, two local business publications and a completely on-line entertainment and music site.

However, as I sat and listened to my former colleagues, I was struck by something. Do we really need those outlets anymore? Do we need any media outlets anymore? Or has Social Media taken over completely?

For me, this was a very radical thought. I spent 26-years as a print reporter. I decided to be reporter when I was 12-years-old. That’s true. One night in the pre-cable television days, I saw a movie about newspapering called  “The Front Page.” It was original 1931 version starring Adolphe Menjou. I was hooked. I followed that path until seven years ago when I saw how the business I loved was sinking. That’s when I made the jump to marketing and public relations.

Now, I wonder more and more if we need the my old avocation. The television reporter made the argument that we do because we need someone to filter and interpret the news.

I know that a lot of people on both ends of the political spectrum think there is come of big conspiracy to make the news favor a particular point of view. That’s what they hear when someone says “filter and interpret.” It’s not true.

All good reporters have a b.s monitor. When someone tells them something, they filter the information through that monitor. Many times, the needle points to the b.s side. Plus, any good reporter tries to put information into context. What does it mean when a government body announces cuts of $10 million to its budget. The reporter’s job is to provide a context, an interpretation, for that budget cut. How many jobs will be lost? What programs will get cut?

However, I am not sure that people want that service anymore. If someone who uses the Web, as the primary source of information is a fairly smart, they are going to check more than one source for their news. If you read two or three online reports, check the blogs and follow the Twitter feed, you can develop a pretty accurate picture of what is the real story.

I have often written about how social media is cutting out the need to advertise in the traditional ways. If the marketing program is implemented correctly, traditional media only has to be a small part of the effort.

Now, I wonder if the same thing is happening to news reporting. Twitter seems to be taking over the  “breaking news” reports that radio and television do. Bloggers are filling the gaps left by publications that have cut their staffs and space they devote to news. Sites such as the Huffington Post – which is both blog and news site – are now viewed as players in the media world. I don’t know about other such sites, but the Huffington Post staffs White House press conferences.  That’s acceptance.

There is nothing to indicate this trend is going to slow down. If anything, is it going accelerate. Maybe there will be a time in the near future when traditional media is no longer relevant.

This is one topic I really curious about what you all think. Please comment and let me know.

So while you can consider this a rant, it is also a warning and a how-to. A rant about why organization and the people who run them don’t try to head off crises; don’t realize what will happen if there isn’t a crisis plan; and a how-to – perhaps avoid the problem.

There are three kinds of crises:

• Immediate crises: Most dreaded type. Happens quickly and unexpectedly. Little time for research and planning. Includes such things as earthquakes, fires, plane crashes, product tampering, workplace shootings, and death of a key officer
• Emerging crises: Allows more time for research and planning. May erupt after festering for long period. Includes such things as sexual harassment, substance abuse, overcharging on contracts. Key is to convince senior management to deal with the problem before it explodes.
• Sustained crises: Problems that smolder for long periods of time, despite best efforts to put out the fire. Rumors go viral, getting reported in the media, tweeted about, posted on Facebook, written about by bloggers and other social media sites. Examples include P & G being in league with Satan, that fluoridated water is dangerous or that some childhood vaccines lead to autism.

Obviously, there isn’t anyway to anticipate the sudden crisis. But that doesn’t mean there shouldn’t be a general plan – a framework – in place to deal with it and whatever happens. How many companies have you seen scramble in the first hours after a crisis happens? It doesn’t have to be that way.

Planning for a specific crisis is not possible. Planning on to handle crises is and should be done.

That’s why I am always amazed when I see a company like Toyota get in trouble. Here is one of the smartest marketers on the face of the planet. Yet, they create a crisis because they don’t listen to their customers’ complaints. Clearly they didn’t have a crisis communication plan in place. That’s just dumb. The list of companies that have done the same thing would fill two blogs.

What all those companies lacked was a scout, someone whose job it was to keep his or ear to the ground (and Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, etc.). If you keep any eye on what’s going on out there, you can avoid a lot of problems. The idea is to identify the grass fire and put it out before it becomes a forest fire.

Sometimes crises happen despite an organization’s best efforts. That’s when the plan comes in. Knowing what to do is half the battle.

Remember, as Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower said: “The plan is nothing; planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of ‘emergency’ is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.”

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.

First, Happy St. Patrick’s Day. As my Irish cousins would day:

May the best day of your past

Be the worst day of your future.

Now onto the rant. In this one, I am channeling my former colleagues in journalism. Some of them read Monday’s blog on press releases. They contacted me and asked to add some other things about press releases. Most of their requests covered the same things I used to complain about. Some things never change.

So, let’s cover them:

• Make sure all of your information has been proofread. There should not be any typographical errors, the names should be spelled correctly, the times should be right and none of the addresses should be wrong. Reporters and bloggers are very sensitive about putting mistakes into print, onto the Web or on the air. Sure, they can later explain it was your fault. But, people usually don’t remember that. The reporter will get blamed. By including that error, you have made the reporter look bad. Think that person is ever going to trust you again?
• Along those same lines, make sure every piece of information you provide is accurate. Have the experts check whatever you write. Same reasons as above. Plus, if you don’t want it made public, do not put in anything that will go to the press. Once it is in the release and winging its way to the media, it’s too late. There are no do-overs in something like this. Calling up a reporter or a blogger and asking them not publish something pretty much guarantees it will be.
• In particular, make sure the contact information for follow-ups is accurate. In addition, realize reporters work different hours than most people – other than the police and nurses – do. A number should be listed where you can be reached after so-called normal business hours. If a editor has a question at 9 p.m. and the reporter doesn’t know the answer, that writer has to be able to reach you to get the answer. If you cannot be reached, a story might not run.
• Make sure when you send the information out there is a headline that clearly says what it is. Don’t get cute. If a blogger, reporter or editor cannot figure in about 30 seconds what the press release is about, odds are good it will get deleted. That goes for social media releases also.
• Make sure your sending the traditional or social media release to the right reporter. Do your research on who it should go to. That’s very important. Read the paper or the blogger so you know what they write about. And make sure you are targeting the correct publication. Do your research to ensure the place you are sending the information to cares about the topic.
• I always advise calling the reporter or blogger before you send the information to gauge their interest and to give them a heads up. If they are not interested, they are not going to change their minds. I promise you that, so don’t send it anyway. If one reporter or editor rejects your information, don’t send it to someone else at the same publication. It ticks them all off. No means no.
• If they do say yes, ask them when you call back to see if they have any questions. Again, if they say they will call you back, let them. Don’t become a pest. What’s important to you might not be as important to the reporter.
• As for embargoes and exclusives, I have mixed feelings.
  • On embargoes, most publications will honor your request to use the news until a certain date. Unless an editor thinks for some reason the competition has the story. Then it will run. Or the editor decides for competitive purposes to break the embargo. You are basically powerless in this unless you live in a very large city with multiple media outlets. If you don’t, you need the media more than they need you.
  • On exclusives, I was the recipient of some and my competition was the recipient of others. What happened when my papers didn’t get an exclusive was that we would often try to shoot the story down. Then you are responding to a skeptical journalist who is mad is at you. Not a good situation.

I hope this helps in your press relations. If you have any more questions, email me at jjccole at jjc-communications.com.

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.

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.