This may come as a shock to lot of bloggers, but they are bound by the same rules on libel, slander and defamation as any reporter at an old media daily newspaper. I have written several times that the Internet is the wild west of the law. There have not been a lot of cases dealing with such things plagiarism, copyright infringement, and other areas of the law that govern publishing.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I am refurbishing a typewriter that will be used during my daughter’s upcoming wedding. The typewriter will be used instead of a standard guest book. Rather than sign something, guests will type their best wishes for the bride and groom – if they remember how to use a typewriter.

As I was cleaning and oiling the machine, I realized there was a metaphorical relationship between social media and that typewriter.

The typewriter was my wife’s college machine. It is really nice Smith-Corona manual. For those of you who never used a typewriter, manual means that it’s not electric. The insides are quite elaborate and sophisticated. It takes a series of levers to move each key so the letter strikes the paper. This thing was state-of-the-art 40 years ago.

Today that state-of-the-art machine is viewed as a quant reminder of a bygone era. Sure some people still use typewriters, but some people still use candles. But just as almost no one relies on candles for their primary light source, almost no one uses a typewriter as their primary source of document production.

Computers have taken over almost completely from typewriters. It has changed the way things are done. I tried to type something on the typewriter yesterday. I found the way I think and formulate ideas has changed. My MacBook is much more efficient and a lot faster. No more using White out correction fluid to paint over mistakes.

Yet when the first word processors came along, there was a lot of a resistance. I worked in newsrooms then, a typewriter dense environment if there ever was one. The old reporters argued those word processors were just not as good or efficient as a typewriter. They were too complex, to prone to error and what would happen if the power went out? Better to stick with the Royal upright typewriters. Again an explanation – an upright typewriter looked like an upright piano.

A lot of people look at social media the same way as those old newsroom bulls looked at word processors. It is too complex, it will never work, why don’t we just stick with what has worked for the last 100 years.

The reasons why not are obvious. Social media works better.

The people who ran newsrooms had the foresight to realize that those word processors were the best choice. They saw they were more cost efficient. Sections of the old production processes could be eliminated, keeping costs down and the product competitive.

You know how most newsrooms got the old ones to accept the word processors? One day it was announced that new equipment was being brought into the newsroom. Anyone who wanted to could take their typewriter home at no charge. It was theirs to keep.

When everyone got in the next day, there were shiny new word processors sitting at each desk. A course in how to use them was given. It was a swim or sink move. It worked. It was a pretty painless change. The veterans realized the change was for the better and it was inevitable.

I think a lot of companies need to do the same thing. Instead of dithering about social media, they need to make the change. It will be for the better. And it is inevitable.

The Cole household needed a plumber last week.  The sewer lateral from our house to our village’s sewer lines was clogged. This happens to be a job that I cannot do myself. It calls for a specialized tool that I would use about once every 20 years. So I needed outside help.

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.

So my son just got married and my daughter is getting married soon. For both big events, I decided to buy suits. We are not a tuxedo kind of family, but for such major events, I didn’t think my normal summer uniform of a t-shirt, cargo shorts and sandals would cut it.

For my son’s wedding, I went to my local Kohl’s Department Store. Kohl’s is a Wisconsin-based company and I like to support the locals. I was pleasantly surprised by helpful the people at Kohl’s were. I could not find pants in my size. A helpful sales woman I flagged down was able to help me. Remember, Kohl’s touts itself as low cost store that sells quality merchandise. Usually that means fewer employees on the floor. Not at Kohl’s though.

Sadly, finding a sales person who was both helpful and knew what she was talking about is getting to be a rare experience. That’s why I shop on line more and more. My experience with customer service at online retailers such as Amazon, Performance Bike and REI has been pretty extraordinary – extraordinarily good.

I cannot say the same thing for many of the experiences I have when I shop. When it came time to buy a suit for my daughter’s upcoming nuptials, my wife and I watched the sales. The lowest price was at a Milwaukee-based traditional department store. So, we drove over to look at suits.

In the hour we were there, we were completely ignored by the sales people. One walked by my wife and asked how she was doing. Now, what he should have asked is if we needed help. A salesman stationed the register seemed to be half asleep. I had the feeling we woke him up when we went to check out.

Yes, we did a buy a suit. The salesman screwed up there too. The suit was unfinished and needed to be altered. He should have asked if we wanted department store’s tailors to do it. I have to believe that’s a profit center. The guy cost his company an extra $60 or so.

It gets even more interesting. I also bought a pair of dress shoes at the same store to go with the suit. When I got them home, I discovered a flaw. So, I trundled back to exchange them. What should have taken 10 minutes took 45 minutes. There was no one staffing men’s shoes. I eventually had to go the store’s offices to get a manager to help me.

Sadly, that experience is becoming all too common. I rarely go to most large stores anymore because there is no one there to provide help. I don’t mind paying a bit more if I am getting exactly what I want and need.

For instance, I do most of my shopping for tools and other hardware at my local Ace Hardware. It is a much smaller store than the three big box hardware stores that operate in Milwaukee. But, I can always find someone to help me who knows what they are talking about. I don’t have to wander through plumbing if I need an electrical part.

That’s why I like online shopping. Every time I have a question, I can reach someone. So far, everyone I have talked to seems to be knowledgeable. It is just a much more pleasant experience. Yes, I sometimes pay a bit more that I would if I bought it from a physical location. But, I will do that for the service and selection.

Which brings me to another point. It is easy to find what I want when I shop on line. Google is very helpful in finding just the right item. I don’t have to ask some know-nothing-doesn’t care clerk if something is in stock.

It seems odd to me that on-line retailers have solved the customer service conundrum at the same time retailers have forgotten it. But, that’s way it goes.

There has been a debate raging over the future of the Internet for the last year or so. However, I don’t most people have even heard the term net neutrality, let alone had the time to delve into the subject. Yet in my opinion, if the debate goes one way, it will change the way all of us use the Internet. It will divide the web into groups of haves and have-nots.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This scares me. It should scare you too.

It surprised me to find out our institutions of a higher learning are just now diving into the social media pool. It’s true that social media as a separate marketing method is only about five-years-old. However, I always look to college campuses as the earliest of adopters. I find it odd that universities are currently almost last to climb into the cutting edge.

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.

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

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

Social Media Value #1:  Unfiltered Feedback

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

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

Social Media Value #2:  Authenticity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social Media Value #4:  Balancing Transparency AND Privacy

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

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

Social Media Value #5: Supporting Statistics

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

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

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

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

Getting Your Board On Board

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

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

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

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

The Bottom Line

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

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

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

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

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

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

Executive: More Perception Than Position

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

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

Eagles Don’t Flock

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

Social Networking: The Problem is “Networking”

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

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

Social Networking: The Problem is “Social”

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

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

Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts

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

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

Social Media: Justified Fear?

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

Don’t Feed Me Another Fad

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

Your Network is Your Net Worth

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

A Gift From Media To You

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

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

Part Two will run Wednesday.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I read an article Sunday about how the depressed the music industry is this summer. It said that in order to make up for income lost because of decreasing CD sales, many top bands had upped concert ticket prices to above $200 for the best seats. Given the current state of the economy, no one with an ounce of sanity is spending that kind of money to see a concert. So concert ticket sales are down and a number of acts have canceled summer tours.

This is, to me, is the beginning of the end game for the music business as it is presently constituted. As anyone with marketing experience can tell you, this is an industry that is doing itself in. The music industry didn’t do the same thing American car manufacturers didn’t do – respond to a changing market place.

“Billboard magazine recently predicted that summer 2010 could be the toughest touring market artists and promoters have had to face since the mid-’90s, citing a spate of nixed shows and canceled tours,” The Washington Post reported July 2.

Performers including the Eagles, John Mayer, Christina Aguilera and Simon & Garfunkel have either canceled dates or “postponed” entire tours because of weak ticket sales.

Why is this happening? Well, let’s get into the way back machine and look what happened when CDs were first introduced. That’s when the problems began.

In 1982, Sony and Phillips Electronics introduced the first CD recording – “The Visitors” by Abba. One would have thought that choice of a first release would have strangled the fledgling format in its cradle. Incidentally, the first CDs had a capacity of 74 minutes. That’s the length of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. I guess that makes up for the Abba release.

This is where the recording industry made its major mistake. Vinyl albums contained between eight and 10 songs. Whether out of hubris, stupidity, greed or something else, the recording industry put the same eight to 10 songs on those first CDs. Those CDs sold for $21.50, according to a 2007 report prepared by Recording Industry Association of America.

That worked until CD burners were first sold to the public in the middle 1990s. People discovered a blank CD actually held between 15 and 20 songs. That was a “hey, what a minute” moment. True, CD prices had dropped to just under $13, according to the RIAA. It was too late. A lot of people felt they were getting ripped off and got angry.

Free file sharing sites such as Napster rose up in response to that anger. The feeling seemed to be if the record companies were going to rip us off, we are going to fight back. Without rehashing the history, this eventually led to the creation of ITunes, where a complete album can be purchased for $9 or $10. The recording industry essentially ceded control of its product to Apple and other such sites.

Plus, feeding that anger, I feel, was rock stars went from being one of us to one of them. The Rolling Stones bought estates in the south of France. Eric Clapton flies around in a private jet. Why should a college kid making $60 or $70 a week delivering pizza or a laid-off worker feel any sympathy for some over-privileged musician?

Apparently not wanting to give up the valet and butler, those fat and happy musicians raised concert ticket prices to make up for the lost CD income. That is so damned odd to me. Did they think somebody not willing to pay more than $10 for a CD is willing to pay over $200 a ticket? I mean, Mick Jagger went to the London School of Economics. Did he skip the lecture on “elasticity of demand?”

What that term means according to the Business Dictionary is “responsiveness of the demand  for a good or service to the increase or decrease in its price. Normally, sales increase with drop in prices and decrease with rise in prices.” Or the less you charge, the more likely people are to buy your product. Well duh!

As I said at the start, I think what we are seeing is the beginning of the end of the music business in its current form. Unlike the American auto industry, they are not pulling up before they crash. I don’t think they know how. Rather than find a solution, they would rather waste their time going after teenagers downloading music. Sad really.

I recently joined foursquare. I thought it would be a good way to find out new places to go in Milwaukee. In the last decade, the Beer City has become a real foodie town. The restaurant offerings range from German to Japanese to Turkish to Ethiopian. There are so many restaurants opening foursquare seemed like a logical way to keep up with new places.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About 20 years ago, my wife and I saw a t-shirt vendor get busted in the parking lot of the old Milwaukee County Stadium. We were there to see Elton John perform. The vendor was arrested because he didn’t get permission to use Elton John’s face or logos. He violated Elton John’s trademarks and copyrights.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, I know I am far from the first person to make the observation that social media is the best way for small business to market. But, Green Bay Packer President Mark Murphy drove the point Friday morning at a “Power Breakfast” sponsored by the Milwaukee Business Journal.

In giving a report on the state of one of the oldest franchises in the National Football League, Murphy stated the team was actively exploring using social media to stay in closer touch with its fan base.

At first, I was surprised. You have to understand there is no more fanatic fan base in all of sports than the Packer Nation. As a note, I am a proud member of that green and gold clad horde.

Before you start bringing up other teams and their fans, let me give you a few facts:

• According to the Packers’ website, the team has sold out 285 straight games at Lambeau Field – 269 regular season, 16 playoff – since 1959. Packer fans go to away games just to get a chance to see the team play in person.
• Heck, 20,000 or so people will show up to watch an outdoors practice.
• The Packers do not sell single game tickets. There is no need.
• Murphy said there are approximately 80,000 people on the season ticket waiting list. According to former Sports Illustrated writer Rick Reilly, an average of 70 people a year give up their tickets. Tickets are usually handed down through the generations. You do the math on how long it will take to cut that season ticket list down.

So, why would a team who is not just in touch with its fans, but seemingly joined at the hip with them, consider jumping into the social media pool? Because like any other small business, the team knows that it cannot rely on what has worked to keep working.

Yes, the Packers are small business in the NFL sense. Their home base is the 257^th largest city in the United States. Yes, they are the state of Wisconsin’s team. Even adding the people who live in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, those people in Northern Illinois who decide to root for the Pack and those from Iowa who aren’t Viking’s fans – the Packers have a potential fan base of around six or seven million people. I think there are that many people trying to get through New York City’s Lincoln tunnel on a Friday night.

Plus those fans are changing.

“My kids don’t read a newspaper,” Murphy noted. Most under 30s do not. So while the older of those in Packer nation still read print media, the younger do not Murphy clearly knows he needs to go where the fans are. For in this time of decreasing brand loyalty and fickle fans, no smart company is going to take anything for granted.

So rather than rely on Wisconsin’s newspapers and television stations, the team is turning to channels such as Facebook and Twitter.

There are several lessons to be learned, but I think the major one is that the Packers are being pre-emptive. They are morphing their marketing efforts before there’s a problem. It is a lesson all businesses should learn.

This might be too easy of a target, but I am getting really frustrated with television reporters and their complete inability to even come close to proper English. Now, I am not talking about using slang or regional expressions. That’s different. Slang and regional expressions often become accepted English.

Let me set the scene for what set me off this time. The western suburbs of Milwaukee were hit hard by tornadoes Monday night. There was extensive damage, but thankfully no one was killed or serious injured.

Of course, the local television stations were all over the story. Although I often criticize local news coverage of weather because it is over-hyped, this is one instance where the coverage was mostly justified. Although at one point last night, I did turn to my wife and note that we wouldn’t know if the US had decided to bomb Iran. The local weather took precedence over all other news.

What set my teeth on edge when one reporter noted that some buildings were “destroyed beyond repair.” Someone badly needs a dictionary. Or when another reporter noted that a building was “totally flattened.” Is there an alternative?

The reporters go on and on like this. I could listen dozen of other examples. As I said, I am not looking for Shakespearean actors here. I just want someone who knows how to put six words together into a sentence.

While I am on the subject, another reporter asked a person whose house was damaged by the storm how they felt. That almost made me throw something at the television.

Now, for those of you don’t know, I spent 26 years as a print reporter. I covered plane crashes, major car accidents, multiple murders, all kinds of natural disasters and even ship sinking. Not once did I ever ask someone how they felt. It might be the dumbest possible question any reporter can ask. How does one feel after finding out a relative was dead or having a home destroyed? What do they expect people to say?

“Well gosh Biff, I feel great that Aunt Henrietta got swept away by the storm. We are in the will. We can pay for that trip to France we always wanted to take.”

Of course, what television people are looking for is emotion. Tears look much better on the evening news than someone dispassionately discussing how they are going to rebuild their lives.

I could go on with this, but you get the idea how I feel about reporters who don’t do their jobs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I don’t watch a lot of television, but when I do, I pay close attention to the advertisements. As a marketer, I like to see what major companies are doing to drum up business. Granted, I think social media would be far more effective, but a lot of companies still feel comfortable with what they view as the tried and true.

Watching commercials always reminds me of a major reason reasons I don’t like traditional advertising. The copywriters and producers constantly use stereotypes and half-truths to make a point. It is a lazy way to make a point. As times, those ads can be downright insulting.

As an example, Kellogg’s has been running a commercial entitled on YouTube “Fruit Loops Doctor Commercial 2009.” The commercial has a small boy playing the doctor, a small girl playing the nurse, and a small boy as a patient.

The commercial claims Fruit Loops can be good for you because it now contains fiber. That claim alone I find dubious. According to Kellogg’s, a typical serving contains three grams of fiber. The American Dietetic Association says children under 12 should be consuming at least an amount of fiber equal to their age plus three. There are a lot better ways for a child to get enough fiber. Fruit and vegetables come to mind.

In addition, the first ingredient listed for Fruit Loops is sugar, 12 grams in a typical serving. The American Heart Association says that’s the amount of sugar a child should consume in an entire day. Somehow, the ad doesn’t mention that.

What really frosts me though are the gender stereotypes. As I said, the doctor is male, the nurse is female. According to the May 6, 2010 New York Times, almost half of medical students are women. The last number I could find – from 2006 – said 33 percent of practicing physicians are women. So why did Kellogg’s or their agency decide the doctor had to be a woman?

Plus, since women make most grocery buying decisions, wouldn’t it be logical to show a sympathetic character?

As for another stereotypes, AT&T has been running a commercial showing a family that has just signed up for AT&T’s Internet service. With that service comes Wi-Fi. Only Dad doesn’t seem to understand how Wi-Fi works. He keeps asking for a cord to connect to the Internet.  He is told the cord is invisible. He asks for his own invisible cable. I mean, come on.

It always bothers me when a campaign singles out a parent – be it mother or father – to ridicule. Why make fun of anybody?

As for the dad in this commercial – I don’t anyone who calls a USB cable a cord. Second, anyone using the Internet on consistent basis must know what Wi-Fi is. What kind of a dolt is this dad?

To me, this kind of commercial is just a very lazy way of doing things. And, no is it not satire. It is just a lack of creativity.

I am a huge sports fan – baseball, football, soccer and bicycle racing in particular. Like most fans, I live to see moments that will go down sports history – Lance Armstrong’s record seventh Tour de France win, Red Sox Bill Buckner booting an easy ground ball, The Immaculate Reception by a Pittsburgh Steeler’s receiver and a lot of other things. I consider myself extremely lucky that I get to see such historic moments.

I am not so happy to see the records BP is now setting in the Gulf of Mexico. We have seen a whole of series of dubious achievements since the explosion April 21^st explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil-drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico. Since I am public relations and social media person, I am going to focus on one area in particular. British Petroleum has perhaps done the worst job of crisis communications in the modern history of public relations. I cannot think of another incident that has been handled worse than the Gulf oil spill.

This should be a lesson to every company. A disaster can happen anywhere, anytime for any reason. It takes about five minutes to destroy a reputation and turn the public against you if it is not handled correctly.

“BP is going to be first and foremost in people’s minds when it comes to poor crisis planning and response,” said Timothy Sellnow, communication professor at University of Kentucky and author of several books on public relations in a crisis told the New York Times. “They’ve surpassed Exxon.”

You know that old saw that goes if you locked 100 monkeys in a room with laptops eventually one of them would come up with Macbeth. Well, I think one monkey could come up with a better way to handle BP’s crisis communications that the company’s leaders.

To talk about all of the public relations things BP has done wrong during this crisis would take more space than I allocate for this blog. Let me put it this way – I cannot think of one thing BP has done right since the explosion. Every time a BP executive or spokesperson opens their mouth they make things worse.

The New York Times reported that Public relations experts say it appears both BP failed to follow the first rule of crisis communications: having a plan in place to deal with a potential disaster, .

“BP never had a plan in place for the worst-case scenario or they would have put it in place,” Kathleen Fearn-Banks, communications professor at University of Washington and author of the book “Crisis Communication, A Casebook Approach” told the Times. “I don’t think it’s a question of money. … They absolutely don’t know what to do at all.”

This should be a lesson to every company whether it has five or 50,000 employees. I constantly hammer on this with clients. A company needs to have a crisis communications plan. It needs to update the plan to reflect changing environments.

Most importantly, it needs to rehearse the plan constantly. Part of that rehearsal means media training the company’s primary spokesman. BP CEO Tony Hayward is a classic example of what happens when that doesn’t happen. If I had been BP’s spokesman when Hayward said he “wanted his life back” I would have resigned on the spot.

Hayward suddenly became the poster child for every out-of-touch CEO on the planet. Whether he meant it or not, he told the people of the Gulf Coast that he was more important than they were. In one five second sound bite, he destroyed any goodwill the company had. Any good leader knows his needs always come last.

BP has done a host of other things wrong, such as trying to ban the media from public areas; not accepting help from the fishermen who know the area best; and making promises they just cannot keep.

It is amazing to me just how inept this multi-national company has been. Let that be an example to every company. Be prepared or you will go down the same road BP is traveling on.

I did something Memorial Weekend that I have not done in years. I spent three days away from the Internet. I recommend it highly. I know this is not the advice you would expect to hear from someone who probably spends 30 or more hours a week online. Let me explain how it happened, why it was good for me, and why I recommend you do it once in awhile.

It happened because my son Shawn got married Memorial Day weekend at Purdue University. He and his wife Beth both met and graduated from there. They are confirmed Boilermakers. So, they wanted to get married at the Purdue Memorial Union.

Because of that, my wife and I made the three-and-a-half hour drive to West Lafayette, Ind. last weekend. As I was packing, I debated taking my laptop with me. I came up with a lot of reasons why I should: I am doing public relations for a major event to be held this coming Saturday and Sunday; I need to write this blog; I could work on my novel; I could catch up on my email; and I could work on a dozen other things.

Plus, I am flat out news junkie. I would be in touch with the world if I had the laptop. I could follow the BP oil spill, the controversy in Israel, other major world events, and the baseball scores.

I actually had the laptop shut down and ready to go Thursday night as I was packing. But, I decided not to take it. Why didn’t I?

I realized that while the laptop didn’t exactly run my life, it certainly dominated a large portion of it. All those things I listed above – well I do all of those and a lot more on a daily basis. I am not complaining. It is how I make my living.

Still, I knew I was getting stale. Blog ideas were becoming harder to come up with. My writing was suffering. I knew it was time to take a break. So, I left the laptop and briefcase home.

It was a smart decision. We got home Sunday evening. I did not turn the laptop on until Monday afternoon. Things were fresh again. I found myself completing tasks I had been putting off. I did a lot of organizational things. Things that were essential for me to function well, but that I had never wanted to deal with.

I now have a dozen ideas for blog posts. I working harder than ever to attract new business. I have been refreshed.

If you had told me last week that taking three days off from the Internet would have that kind of effect, I would have laughed at you. But the more I think about it, the more it makes sense.

I have always built rest days into my bike training. I find if I ride three days in a row, take a day off, ride two more days and then take another day off, my training goes much better. If resting works for my body, why shouldn’t it work for my brain?

So, I am encouraging you to do the same. Take a weekend off from the Internet. Turn off the laptop, put away the smart phone and relax. Read a book, go for a walk, do something other than work. Give your brain a break. It will thank you for that.



There are two kinds of viruses on the Internet. The evil kinds are those that attacked my blog two weeks ago. It denied my service for about a week until the experts solved the problems.

The second kind, the kind we marketers want, are those of our efforts that “go viral.” In other words, everyone and their brother is watching our YouTube videos, retweeting our thoughts and reading our blogs. That is the kind of virus that can take an obscure issue – such a broken guitar – and blow into a worldwide phenomenon.

Now, going viral is not an easy thing to do. I cannot guarantee the suggestions I am about to make will provide definitive answers on how to do it. It is hard to predict in what people will become interested. But, I have been able to drive traffic to client’s sites by using a combination of tools.

What does going viral mean? It means it is one so good that people pass it on and on and on. It means the person who created the campaign doesn’t have to do anything but sit back and watch.

According to Advertising Age, these the top viral campaigns in 2009:

What they all have in common is good production values, a compelling story, and a willingness not to talk down to the viewer.

Good production values are key. I always tell clients if they want to go viral, it pays have a professional make the video. Yes, I have watched many of the videos made by amateurs. There are compelling to watch. But they are not trying to sell anything. I firmly believe that anyone offering a product should do everything thing possible to make their product look good.

A compelling story is very important. You can have the greatest production values in the world, but if no wants to watch, what’s the point? I also like campaigns that do one of two things – make me think or make me laugh. Those are the ones that grab and hold my attention.

Not talking down to viewers is very important. I hate it when a campaign assumes I am not very bright. That’s why I immediately turn off any ad that makes the father look stupid. I like campaigns that treat me as an equal that knows what he wants. Granted I do this for a living, so I am probably more critical than the average person. But I have never like it when a campaign makes fun of someone.

As I said, I cannot guarantee those ideas will work for creating a campaign that will go viral. However, they cannot hurt.

I want to again apologize the erratic posting of late. I cannot stand it when a blogger doesn’t stick to a schedule. Unless I want to be a hypocrite, I have to hold myself to the same standard. I will be going back to a consistent schedule.

That being said, there will be no positing Monday, May 31^st, because it is a holiday in the United States. PR 101 will resume Wednesday, June 2. Thank you for your support and patience.

So, after unplanned week off from blogging – more about that later – I sat at my keyboard trying to come up with a topic for this week’s blog. I realized I have a lot of items that wouldn’t make up an entire blog, but are still things I want to put out there. So, here are some of them.

Apple Inc.’s Marketing

Whether you are a Mac or a PC, you have to admire the way Apple markets itself.  The phrase I used to start the previous sentence is an example. Apple has become an iconic product. It’s marketing is transcending its market and becoming part of the general conversation. Which frankly is genius.

Of course Apple runs television advertisement for its products. However, those commercials are just one leg of the centipede that is Apple’s marketing plan. I cannot think of another company whose products go viral faster than Apple. They are word-of-mouth geniuses. You gotta admire that.

BP and The Oil Spill

That would make a great name for a punk band. In the real world, it has been an unmitigated disaster for British Petroleum on so many levels.

If you remember, last I blogged about the need for a crisis communication plan. That plan cannot sit on the shelf and gather dust. Just like every other part of crisis planning, a crisis communication plan has to be practiced. In that way, when the real thing happens, the communications team will know what to do.

I have to say that if BP did have a plan, it ain’t working. They have so ham handed about the way they dealt with the media. Their people actually got testy about what the company was doing. Bad idea. That just leads to more bad press.

The only way to act when there millions of oil that will potentially damage eco-systems from Louisiana to Florida and beyond is contrite.

Ford’s Advertising Campaign
Ford Motor Co. clearly gets it when it comes to telling the public about their products. Their current ads are the firs I have been in a long time that actually talk about their product’s attributes. That is a good way to get consumers interested.

If you watch television commercials for automobiles, you will notice that the ads rarely talk about what’s in the car. Most of the time, the commercials are trying to sell image. The one exception to that are truck commercials. The people who buy trucks want to know about horsepower and payload. They don’t care about image. They care about owning a tool that will get the job done.

Ford seems to have transferred that idea to car advertisements. The commercials for such things as the Ford Fusion or the Escape SUV talk about cargo space, gas mileage and horsepower. Those are thing I want to know about when I look at cars.

The Internet

I never realized how much I relied on the ability to use the Internet until part of it was taken away from me.

As I am sure you all noticed last week PR 101 was attacked by a virus. It was part of a larger attack on WordPress Blogs hosted by Go Daddy. I eventually had to take the blog down to protect all of you from getting infected. It took awhile, but the viruses were eventually flushed from the system. I have to give kudos to the Go Daddy customer support for helping me.

I also have to give a huge thank you to Joao Moraes of Sao Paulo, Brasil. Joao is the man who designed this blog and maintains it for me. It was he who helped me work my way through all of the issues a virus attack presents. If it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t have a blog.

I also have to thank of all of you readers for sticking with me. I appreciate it. Thank you.

So on Monday I laid the beginnings of my writing primer. Today, I want to talk about actual writing. I could fill another 20 blogs on the dos and don’t of writing properly. Obviously, I am not going to that. I do want to cover some of more of the basics of good writing.

First, one of my favorite statements on writing – it comes from Mark Twain – is:  “I notice that you use plain, simple language, short words and brief sentences. That is the way to write English – it is the modern way and the best way. Stick to it; don’t let fluff and flowers and verbosity creep in. When you catch an adjective, kill it. No, I don’t mean utterly, but kill most of them – then the rest will be valuable. They weaken when they are close together. They give strength when they are wide apart. An adjective habit, or a wordy, diffuse, flowery habit, once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.” Letter to D. W. Bowser, 20 March 1880.

That first sentence is the key to all good writing. Keep it simple. Twain also once noted he got paid the same amount for using the word cop as he did for using policeman. It is a good lesson. Too many people think that their writing had to be full of long words and even longer sentences. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Simple is always best.

The other author I suggest most writers emulate is Ernest Hemingway. Here from “Ernest Hemingway on Writing” – edited by Larry W. Phillips – are the best writing tips I have ever found. I follow them religiously. I give them to you because I cannot do any better. They are:

• Start with the simplest things.
• Boil it down.
• Know what to leave out.
• Write the tip of the iceberg; leave the rest under the water.
• Write what you see.
• Listen completely.
• Write when there is something you know, and not before.
• Look at words as if seeing them for the first time.
• Use the most conventional punctuation you can.
• Distrust adjectives
• Learn to write a simple declarative sentence
• · Tell a story in six words (Hemingway did just that. The story is “For sale: baby shoes, never used.”)
• Read everything so you know what you need to beat
• Don’t try to beat Shakespeare
• Accept that writing is something you can never do as well as it can be done.
• Don’t drink when you’re writing.
• Finish what you start.
• Don’t worry. You’ve written before and you will write again.
• Forget posterity. Think only of writing truly.
• Write as well as you can with no eye on the market.
• Write clearly – and people will know if you are being true.
• Just write the truest sentence that you know.
• Remember that nobody really knows or understands the secret.
• And the best tip of all – go fishing in summer.

If you follow what Twain and Hemingway have to say, you will turn out good copy.

The post I wrote a couple of weeks about good writing being a necessity for social media – and everything else – continues to spark a lot of debate. That’s a good thing. It occurred to me that besides just talking about the need for good writing, I should talk about how I feel it should be done.

Becoming a good writer takes persistence and diligence. But, anyone can do it if they are willing to do the work.

Before I start, let me present my credentials as a writing maven. I have been writing since I was five. My seventh grade English teacher, Mr. Mulvey, gave me my first concrete lessons on writing for publication. I was journalism major in college and had the pleasure of being taught by one of the best writing teachers ever – Dr. Paul Snider. Dr. Snider was tough on bad writing. We lived in fear of his editing, but it made us better writers.

I then spent 26 years in newsrooms, perhaps the best place to learn how to write well. Editors have very little patience for bad writing and let you know in a very direct way. It toughens you up and teaches you much.

I have also worked with writers groups as I write my novel and short stories. It is always good to work with other writers. They will provide insights into your work that you won’t be able to see yourself.

Plus, I read incessantly. Any person who wants to be a writer needs to read other writers. I will get to who I think you should read later on.

Sorry that took so long. But, I wanted to demonstrate I know what I am talking about. So, let’s get to it.

What you choose to use to write is up to you. I have friends who write long hand on legal pads, others who still use typewriters, and those like me who use computers. It doesn’t matter how you physically produce the words.

Now for the creative part of the process. There is a story that is probably apocryphal told about author Kurt Vonnegut when he was teaching at the Iowa Writers Workshop. Vonnegut walked into the classroom one day, surveyed the assembled students, and said: “how many of you here want to be writers?” Of course, everyone raised their hand. Vonnegut paused for a minute, looks around, and said: “so why aren’t you all out writing right now?”

Apocryphal or not, the story makes a good point. You want to be a writer – write every chance you get. Make time to do it. Make sure nothing gets in the way.

That brings me to a suggestion every writing teacher I have ever had has made – keep a journal. Write in it everyday. Don’t show it to anyone. It’s kind of like going to a private gym. A journal is a place to experiment and to practice. You can make all of the mistakes you want. That’s why you should not show it to anyone. You don’t need anyone to critique it. It’s your space – no one else’s.

Of course, like any craftsperson, a writer needs tools. There are three I suggest:

• A good dictionary. Do not use the Microsoft word dictionary, especially when it comes to syntax checking. I suspect engineers wrote it. Whoever wrote it needed some basic writing training. The ultimate word source is the Oxford English Dictionary. You can purchase an online subscription. But a good edition of an American dictionary works just as well.
• The key source for all writers – “The Elements of Style” by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White. This little book will tell you everything you need to know about grammar. It is also online. I use the online version because I have gone through two printed ones, both which eventually fell apart from use.
• A book called “Eats, Shoots, & Leaves.” It is subtitled “The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation.” It was written Lynne Truss, an English editor and writer. The title tells you what the book’s about. It is invaluable. Proper punctuation can be a minefield. Many people do not realize how a misplaced comma or the lack of a semicolon can change a sentence’s meaning. This book will show you.

Speaking of writing, another key to good writing is saying as much as possible using as few words as possible. I will discuss how to do that and other things in Wednesday’s blog. In the meantime, I will end this piece here.

There was a large readership, but not a lot of comments, on Monday’s blog covering what I feel are the rules of social media. I guess that means people agree with the rules I am proposing.

As I said Monday, every community needs rules. Otherwise, there is anarchy. No one can do anything is a community in that kind of atmosphere. Social media is no different.

So, here are some more divided by the applications I use most:

• So let’s talk about LinkedIn first –
  • If I do not know you, do not ask me to endorse you. I have over 6,000 followers on LinkedIn, all good smart people. But there is no way I will ever know enough about most of these people to provide an endorsement. I enjoy interacting with them, but that’s not a basis for a recommendation.
  • Join some groups on LinkedIn. That’s one of the best parts of the site, connecting with people who have similar interests. Once you are accepted into a group, don’t be a lurker. Comment on discussions and start discussions of your own. It’s how we all learn.
  • Speaking of groups, if I don’t accept your invitation to join a group, it means I don’t want to. Don’t keep sending invitations.
  • If someone sends you an invitation, and you do not want to accept, do not IDK them. Archive the invitation. As I understand it, if a person accumulates enough IDKs they are banned from LinkedIn. So be nice.
  • Now Twitter –
    • No one is saying you have to tweet 30 times a day, but once or twice a day is nice. Why else are you on there if you don’t tweet?
    • Retweet tweets you like. It is just common courtesy, plus it helps spread the word.
    • This is a personal one, but I do not like people who use bots to increase their follower numbers. I have almost 8,500 followers, but I did it organically, one at-a-time. So don’t send me tweets saying you have a program that increases my followers. This is not high school; the person with the most followers doesn’t win.
    • If you post a blog or something else, tweet about once. That tells everyone that it is out there. That’s okay. But only tweet once. Anything more than that is like ringing the doorbell 20 times in a row.
    • Don’t use auto tweets. I was guilty of this myself last year. It is wrong and I stopped doing it. It is just not honest.
    • Do not send me any tweets about multi-level marketing schemes. I don’t believe you and I will never will.
    • Facebook. I admit I have some issues with Facebook. I think there is way too much extraneous stuff on it. Frankly, I think marketing attempts get lost in the thicket of Farmville, Mafia Games and other stuff.
      • Now, I admit I have taken a couple of quizzes on Facebook. But, it was my decision. I do not play Farmville or Mafia games. I worked on a dairy farm as a kid. It is not anything like that game. For one, you do not get manure all over yourself and the cows don’t kick.
      • As for the Mafia Wars game, I covered the Mafia a lot as a reporter. Not a nice group of people, frankly. I hate it when people glamorize a group that killed people. I have never understood the appeal. What’s next, Al Qaeda Wars? So, don’t ask me to play.
      • Do not create a fan page of yourself and then ask others to become your fan. Remember that rule about not thumping your own chest in social media? Well, this is the penultimate example. To me, it is egotistical and narcissistic. You build fans by demonstrating value, not by asking.

I could write an entire blog about the dos and don’ts of blogging. I have been at it for over year. I think I will cover it next week.

Again, if you like or don’t like these rules, please let me know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now then, here they are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

They are:

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

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

Why it is every time I turn on the television or listen to the radio, some company is trying to scare me into buying their product? Instead of touting the benefits of their offering, they tell me I will be facing dire consequences if I don’t purchase what they’re selling.

Now, I don’t watch a lot of television, but there are some shows I like. I am excluding watching sports. That’s a whole another issue. As a loyal Milwaukee Brewers, New York Yankees and Green Bay Packer fan, I try to watch as many of their games as possible.

Of course, watching television means accepting the advertising that comes with it. I don’t have a problem with that. It is how the broadcast networks can afford to provide those shows. I love PBS, but I am not naïve enough to think every network could hold pledge drives to keep themselves on the air.

What I don’t like are ads such as the one General Motors runs for its OnStar® system. Briefly, OnStar® is an “in-vehicle security, communications, and diagnostics system” GM puts in more than 50 of its models. It notifies an operator when there has been accident. It can also be used to track and shut down a stolen car and be used for diagnostic purposes.

In the television commercials, former NFL player Howie Long shows a “skeptical” customer how only OnStar® will help him in the event of an accident. The radio commercials are lot more graphic. The commercials play out scenarios where someone has been in accident and because of OnStar®, they are saved. Or a stolen car is found because of OnStar®.

H & R Block, the tax preparers, did something similar during tax season. At least one commercial talked about how there were something like over 1,000 changes made to the U.S. Tax Code. The narrator said how people should have H & R Block prepare their returns because of those changes. It intimated if you didn’t go there, you would be in trouble.

To deal with the last example first, there might have been over 1,000 changes to the tax code. But, I am willing to bet most of them were not to the personal income tax section of the code. What most people don’t realize is lot of laws are changed every year for many reasons, often very minor ones such as misplaced period or a word out of place.

Why should creating even more anxiety over something that has sweating already be a marketing technique?

As for GM, to me those ads are almost disingenuous. Yes, it is true OnStar® would help you. But, so would a lot of other new cars’ systems. Almost every car built today has Blue Tooth capability. Ford, for instance, has a hands free system in its cars. I was in a Lexus the other day that had the same thing. The systems allow a cell phone to be locked in to a cradle, so it would not go flying in an accident. A call could be made after an accident.

However, I have yet to see either Ford or Toyota, or other car companies, talk about how you need that Blue Tooth system in case of accident.

Plus, I am not sure I want people to be able to find me when I am in my car. Maybe I have read George Orwell’s “1984” one too many times, but I don’t like the idea of someone else being able to track my car. I don’t want someone else, no matter how benevolent they are now, to have the power to stop my car.

Frankly, in both cases here, and all of the other companies that do the same thing, I would rather hear about the product’s features and cost. I don’t want to think I end facing prison for tax evasion, or left to die an accident. That is just not the way I want to be approached.

I would like to thank the University of Wisconsin – Whitewater Public Relations Student Society of America for inviting me to speak April 24^th. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. There were a lot of very bright students from UW-Whitewater, UW-Lacrosse, UW-Stephens Point and UW-Oshkosh at the PRSSA regional meeting. Thanks again.



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did you ever notice how hard businesses work to attract new business? Yet, once they make the sale, they act like a two-year-old. They lose interest and move on to what looks like another shiny opportunity. They only notice the old sale when some other company tries to take the customer away. The two-year-old mentally kicks again. They suddenly want to keep what they ignored because someone else wants it.

The problem with being reactive is that it’s usually too late. A customer ignored is usually a customer lost.

That has always struck me as a strange way to do business. Yet, I see it all the time.

I am reading a book called “Flip The Funnel. How to Use Existing Customers to Gain New Ones” by Joseph Jaffe, president and chief interrupter (a title I love, by the way) of the Long Island-based consulting firm crayon. It lays out the reasons why more efforts should be focused on keeping existing customers.

As Jaffe says in the book: “why – if our customers are the lifeblood of our business – are we not relatively investing in them according?”

Jaffe cited a number of examples of why marketing to existing companies is extremely important, but I will give one. In 2008, customers who made more than three purchases from online shoe retailer Zappos accounted for 50.2 percent of the company’s business. In comparison, those people who only ever made one purchase accounted for 28.6 percent of sales. The remaining 21.2 percent of sales came from those who made two or three purchases.

So, a little more than half of the company’s business came from loyal, committed customers. Now, Zappos works hard to serve to that group of people. As they should – these people are the company’s most reliable revenue stream.

According to the website 1000ventures.com:

• Acquiring new customers can cost five times more than satisfying and retaining current customers.
• A two percent increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10 percent.
• The average company loses 10 percent of its customers each year
• A five percent reduction in customer defection rate can increase profits by 25-125 percent, depending on the industry.
• The customer profitability rate tends to increase over the life of a retained customer.

Yet, despite all of those facts, most companies work harder to attract new customers than they do to keep the ones they have. I have to say marketing agencies are part of the problem. When was the last time you read about an agency touting its ability to hang onto existing customers?

Yes, it is important to attract new business. But, I would argue that it is more important to hold onto the business your company already has. As Jaffe points out, churning business is a bad thing.

That churn forces companies to focus too much energy on replacing lost business. It takes less energy and effort to hold onto an existing customer than it does to attract a new one. The energy used to attract new business could be better used coming up with new ways to satisfy existing customers. After all, happy customers don’t leave.

Which brings me to another point. It is an axiom in the agency business that a client will want to shift its a business when a new marketing manager takes over. I suspect the same axiom holds true in other businesses, although it might when a new buyer takes over or when management changes. The argument goes that the new executive at the client will like some other agency and will make a switch for that reason alone. I have seen a lot of companies that just give up when there’s a change in the client’s executive team changes.

It doesn’t have to be that way. The mindset needs to change.  Social media is an excellent way to maintain a brand and hence hold onto clients. In the coming weeks, I will be talking about some companies that do customer retention very well. I am always looking for examples. Let me know which companies you think do it well and how they do it.  If you have examples, I would like those too.



Many major corporations around seem to be either scared of social media or want to pretend it doesn’t exist. Yet one of the largest and oldest companies on Earth – IBM – has embraced the new way of marketing. It has moved into the area with a lot of enthusiasm and success.

All of that effort would have gone nowhere if the people charged with integrating social media didn’t take the company’s culture into account, Tim Blair, IBM’s vice-president for Marketing and Communications said. Blair spoke at the PR + Social Media Summit held at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI. Marquette and a number of Wisconsin companies sponsored the summit.

I wanted to hear Blair speak because IBM has a reputation in the social media world of being one of the most open companies when it comes to social media.

What makes this particularly interesting is that IBM is almost a century old. This is a not a Starbucks, Southwest Airlines, or Zappos. Those companies are all fairly new. Their corporate cultures are still forming, so it would seem to me to be easier to incorporate social media.

IBM, on the other hand, used to be known for its rigid corporate culture. When my late brother worked there in the late 1960s, the standard uniform was a white shirt, subdued tie, and gray suit. You did not deviate from that.

For a company such as IBM to change its culture to allow its employees to act as individuals is a stretch. It impressed me that such an institution is willing adopt a new way of doing things. It reminds of how the U.S. is also willing to stretch its culture to allow its members to use social media. The company accomplished because people such as Blair understood what would it take to make the change.

“Social media needs to be derivative of business model and corporate culture,” Blair explained. “Culture always wins. You have to figure out to stretch the culture. Not changing the culture, but stretching it. Social media needs to be a derivative of the business and corporate culture.”

The first step in moving into social media is knowing where a company wants social media to take them. There has be a definition of the destination, Blair said.

“You need to know where are going or you will fail,” Blair said.

Stretching means working to ensure social media becomes a part of it. It is almost impossible to change a corporate culture, Blair said. If you try to do that, you will fail. What needs to be done is to demonstrate how social media will fit into what the company is already doing.

“Social media does fundamentally change how you manage communications,” Blair said. “When I arrived at IBM, communication was very linear. But social media has helped flatten that out.”

IBM now uses social media for internal and external communications, Blair said. It has three primary uses within the company: to flatten communication channels, to help employees learn and to influence the conversation going on among all of IBM’s stakeholders.

As example of internal use, Blair cited the company’s management training program. IBM used to fly all of its managers into its Armonk, N.Y. headquarters for training. It now trains them via the Internet. The training is as effective ever and it saved IBM money, he said.

A key to using social media is empowering employees, Blair said. IBM does not lock its employees out of the Internet. That would be counterproductive, he said.

“At the end of the day, we want to empower everybody, Blair said. “Our brand is experienced by the expertise our employees in the field have with customers. We have to trust those employees.”

Every IBM employee is seeped in the company’s values. That’s important because it ensures those employees will hew to those values when they use social media, Blair said.

In fact, the company’s social media policies – first created in 2005 – were created by the employees. There are now 17,000 blogs written by IBM employees, he said.

There was a learning curve for senior executives, Blair said. They had to shown why it was important to deal with bloggers whom they had never heard of before. It took them awhile to understand the influence bloggers could have, That doesn’t mean the company ignores traditional media, he added. Engaging with the traditional outlets is still important, he said.

As I said, it was impressive. I think a lot of companies can learn from the computer giant did.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I meet a lot of people who are really good at most parts of social media. However, they fail at the most important part – actually being social. What I mean is actually meeting with, and talking to, people face-to-face.

When clients hire me, the first thing I tell them is that I will help do everything possible to convince potential customers to come through the client’s front door.  That might mean blogging, it might mean using Twitter and Facebook, or social bookmarking. I also might encourage them to use traditional public relations tactics, such as issuing press releases or a media event to gain coverage in the local press and on television.

All of that should be done, but none of it will complete the task. As I said, it will get that potential customer into your lobby. But, that’s as far as it will take them. The next thing that needs to be done is for you to come out into that lobby and talk to that person. I mean that literally. You need to be in the same room to close the deal.

Any number of anthropologists and social scientists have documented the importance of face-to-face meetings. Much human communication doesn’t include talking. Gestures, facial expressions, eye contact, and posture are all important.

In doing the research for this particular blog, I found a report from the Harvard Business Review Analytic Services that explained it well. In a 2009 survey of 2,211 Harvard Business Review subscribers, 95 percent those responding felt face-to-face meetings were the most important part in their efforts in establishing long-term relationships. The survey found that “across the board, face-to-face meetings were seen as the most effective method for conducting business with key stakeholders, compared with videoconferences, teleconferences, and webinars.”

A note on the study – it was commissioned by British Airways as part of its campaign to get business people traveling again. However, I feel the results are still valid.

Those responding to the survey said that people-to-people meetings were seen as most effective for:

• Negotiating contracts (82 percent)
• Interviewing potential staff (81 percent)
• Understanding customers (69 percent)

Face-to-face meetings are how I prefer to find new clients. I do a lot of networking. I belong to several groups where I can meet those who might need my services. That’s not the only reason I belong. I also do it because I can learn things by attending meetings.

One thing about joining groups – I belong to my professional association, the Public Relations Society of America. However, that is not a place where I try to, or expect to, find clients. These are people who do the same thing I do. I belong for professional advancement and to advance my profession. Plus, it’s good to talk to people who do the same thing I do.

For networking purposes, join groups such as your local Better Business Bureau or Kiwanis or the Lions or some other group. However don’t join just for picking up new business. You are there to contribute and learn. Other members are going to quickly figure out you don’t have any real interest in the organization if all you are doing is trying to sell yourself.

To bring this full circle, personal meetings in this setting are a lot like social media. You want to give people a reason to consider hiring you or your company. Saying “I am the best there is, hire me” is not a reason. You have to demonstrate why hiring you makes sense. Pounding your chest is not going to work. In fact, it will make most people head in the other direction.

Remember, social media is about having a conversation. That means you to listen to others, be it at a group’s meeting, or with a client. You need to hear what they are saying. How else are you going to learn what their needs are?

The ultimate goal is creating good word-of-mouth about you and your company. That will lead both to more business and good relationships. I can tell it has happened to me because I follow what I preach. Do what I do and it will happen for you also.

I was going through one of my wife’s and my email inboxes the other day. It struck me that I was deleting a lot of messages from legitimate retailers. Why was I doing that? Because they send a lot – too many to be honest.

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.

I was at lunch meeting the other day, listening to four representatives of the Milwaukee media discuss how they are now using social media a great deal. They all said Twitter is a good way to reach out to them, they all have presences on Facebook and how their blogs give them chances to do more in-depth writing.

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.

The news and blogosphere have been full of items lately on various crises – from Toyota to the Catholic Church – large organizations are struggling to deal with issues that threaten to swamp them. The sad thing is that it doesn’t have to be that way. If organizations would use bit of common sense and foresight, the crises would either never occur or they wouldn’t grow into major issues.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

For the past few years, I have thought the press release was an outmoded way of getting the word out. From my own experience as a reporter, I know how little time reporters have to read all the stuff they get daily. However, the old fashioned released has morphed into a social media release. It is press release on performance enhancing drugs. I am starting to see how effective that kind of release can be.

When I was a reporter, press releases were a fact of my workday. Before the Internet, dozens arrived daily in the standard number 10 business envelope. As a young reporter, I dutifully read through each and every one of them. I thought it was the right thing to do. Who knew, maybe the key to next Pulitzer Prize was in the one of those envelopes.

Reporters get a lot of mail from every imaginable source. Not just press releases, but letters from convicts who feel they are wrongly accused, happy readers, angry readers, story ideas written on pencil on legal paper and a lot of other stuff. That avalanche of envelopes is what stopped from reading every press release. I just didn’t have time to weed through them every day. I would quickly sort through the pile, keeping only the ones with return addresses that told me the company might have to say.

The people I dealt with soon learned the best way to get my attention was to call me. We would discuss a potential story and if I was interested, I would request more information. Even then, I didn’t want a press release. What I wanted was background information that provided basic facts – things such as the size of company, number of employees, annual income, size of the project, that kind of stuff.

I don’t think I ever missed a story by not reading the press releases. My sources knew if they gave me a good story, I would fight like hell to get it into the paper. I was usually a pretty good salesman.

When I switched to public relations seven years ago, I brought the anti-press release attitude with me. Because I spent 26 years as a reporter, I have great contacts all over the U.S. and even some internationally. Reporters used to be professional nomads. We would continually switch jobs, always striving to get to a bigger paper with a larger circulation. You make a lot of friends doing that. So, if I had a client who needed a story placed, I could usually reach a person who could make that happen.

Even when I didn’t know somebody, I was pretty skilled at getting a story into a publication. I speak the language of reporters. I know what gets them excited. I know the first four words you say to any reporter when you call. I should make this a quiz, but I won’t – the first four words are: “are you on deadline?”

That’s all changing with the rise of social media and the shrinking of regular media. There are fewer reporters chasing more stories. They need stuff they know is accurate and can access quickly.

As I said at the start, enter the social media press release. What is it?

As I also said, it is press release on steroids. It is so much more than the old paper press release. When I set up one up for a client, I include pictures, background material, contact information, video, links to my client’s website, their Twitter feed, their Facebook fan page and the LinkedIn pages of key executives. It is so much more complete than the old ones.

And sites such at Pitch Engine allow you to send links to the information out to just about anybody to whom you want.

What I usually do is call the key contacts I want to receive the information to give them a heads up that it’s up. Then I email the link so they can access the data. I have found universal acceptance for this.

Reporters and bloggers seem to love it. At one of the click of the mouse, they get anything they need for their story. It makes their job easier, which makes them happy, which means they are more likely to a do a positive story. That in turn makes my client happy, which makes ultimately makes me happy.

So, you see, while the traditional press release is going, going…. , the social media release is on its way. Once again, social media takes a traditional method of doing something and improves it.

My brother died 13 years ago. My mother died 11 years ago. Neither ever lived Wisconsin. They lived in Florida.

Yet, at least once a month, sometimes more often, we receive mail for them at the Cole household. They have  been offered credit cards, had requests for donations, to buy health insurance, and in my brother’s case, offers to help him manage his diabetes. A little late on that I think.

We started receiving mail for them about six months after my mother died. I was the executor of the estates, so my address did end up on all correspondence. However, both estates were closed out years ago. I haven’t sent out anything involving either of them in at least seven years.

Yet, somehow, a bunch of lowlife list companies and lazy marketers still send mail for them. Initially, right after both deaths, it upset me. The wounds were still raw. I used to return the mailings with “addressee deceased” written on the envelope. I gave up after awhile because it stopped nothing from coming. Now, I do not even bother to open anything. They just get tossed.

Now, I have to say, I hate junk mail. I always have and I always will. I cannot believe it is all that effective. All it does kill trees. Since the advent of the “no-call” lists blocked telemarketers, direct mail has to be the dumbest way to try and reach customers. Okay, spam email might be worse, but at least I can block most of that.

Do the people who do this really think I am going to buy a product from an unsolicited mailing? Do these people even read marketing research? Do they not know that there are other more effective, less annoying, and less intrusive ways to reach their marketing goals? Have they not heard of the Internet or social media?

And as long as I am ranting, what about these groups that send address labels? Do they really think some sticky pieces of paper with my name and address on it are going to move me to make a donation? It won’t. I have no qualms about using the labels. I just don’t send any money back.

Least you think I am a scrooge, I volunteer with several charities in the Milwaukee area. My wife and I also make donations to groups whose work we want to support. But we choose the groups to which we are going donate. We do our research, check out the group’s federal tax filings and then write a check. Research is key. I want to make sure at least 90 percent of our donation is going to go help someone. I don’t want pay for a large office or a trip to a seminar.

I also do pro bono work for a Milwaukee group that needs the help.

As a note, do not send me a solicitation for anything based on this blog. I will not answer it.

Getting back to my point about how of much of a donation goes to help the given cause, that’s what really bothers me about mail solicitations. How much does it cost to write, print, prepare, and send out those direct mailings? Wouldn’t that money be better spent helping people?

Instead of licking envelopes, find another, more effective way to reach people. Don’t know what they are? Send me an email.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NBC demonstrated to me Sunday night that they are tone deaf when it comes to social media. Which means they are tone deaf when it comes to listening to their viewers. That’s dangerous. They should ask United Airlines or Proctor & Gamble what happens when you ignore people who use social media.

If you were watching the Olympics Sunday, you saw what I thought was a pretty good closing ceremony. If you lived anywhere other than the United States, you got to see the ceremony straight through without interruption. If you were unlucky enough to be watching the NBC television network, your Olympic viewing was interrupted by an insipid reality show called “The Marriage Ref,” and local news. In all, there was about an hour break in the viewing. For those living in the eastern time zone of the U.S., that meant they had to stay up until 1 a.m. to see the entire ceremony.

As one who closely monitors social media, I can tell you the Twittersphere was alive with complaints. I have no idea how many, but I can you there were thousands judging by how fast the hashtags #NBC and #NBCFail kept updating. And the anger wasn’t just over the decision to cut off the Olympics; it was also over the decision to bring Jay Leno back to the Tonight Show.

Here’s a sample of the tweets going out on #NBCFail:

• wtfgerard: RT @nNoela: NBC is continuing their Winter Olympics coverage with a new downhill event. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. #imwithcoco #nbcfail I give this tweeter credit for combining his anger on two events into one tweet.
• disappointedme: BOYCOTT LENO and his Olympic killing network. #TeamCoco #imstillwithcoco #NBCFAIL #RIKSHAZ9LIRK #SuckitNBC As a note: the hashtags “I’mwithcoco (Conan O’Brien) was the third most popular topic on Twitter Monday. That’s quite an accomplishment considering there are an estimated 50 million tweets a day.
• MONTANAinAZ: RT @ColorMeRed: Just to thank NBC for their exceptional coverage (sarc) of the Winter Olympics, my TV will be reprogrammed to everything but NBC #NBCfail This was a particularly popular tweet. I saw it at least a dozen times.
• lvnTrey: RT @ChefMark: Although sad that the Olympics is over, I’m happy that NBC’s reign of tyranny on my set is over! #NBCFail. Oh, and #shutupCostas

You get the idea. There was a lot of anger. And a lot of calls for boycotting NBC. The anger went viral pretty quickly. As I write this on Tuesday, it is still going on. If anything, the flames are burning brighter.

What surprised me is that I never saw any response from NBC to all of this. They did apparently use an application called TwitterFeed to send out positive sounding tweets about “The Marriage Ref.” TwitterFeed is an app in which you enter a bunch of tweets at one time and then schedule them to be sent out over whatever time period you want. Judging by the tweets, I would say someone decided to send a tweet about every 10 minutes.  You can often tell someone has done this because the tweets tend to be phrased alike. They stopped when several people called NBC on it.

Doing that is a violation of one of my social media rules: don’t ever pretend to be something you are not. The social media universe hates lying. And, it destroys credibility.

Getting back to my main point, I am shocked frankly that the once proud Peacock Network did nothing to calm down angry viewers. NBC is in fourth place in a four-network race. They cannot afford to do something like this. This is not 15 years ago. Social media keeps things alive.

In NBC’s position, they cannot alienate their stakeholders. Those viewers have other choices. Fox, CBS, ABC and the hundreds of cable channels will all benefit from NBC’s decision not to engage with its viewers. It doesn’t appear NBC understands that. It’s sad.

NBC demonstrated to me Sunday night that they are tone deaf when it comes to social media. Which means they are tone deaf when it comes to listening to their viewers. That’s dangerous. They should ask United Airlines or Proctor & Gamble what happens when you ignore people who use social media.

If you were watching the Olympics Sunday, you saw what I thought was a pretty good closing ceremony. If you lived anywhere other than the United States, you got to see the ceremony straight through without interruption. If you were unlucky enough to be watching the NBC television network, your Olympic viewing was interrupted by an insipid reality show called “The Marriage Ref,” and local news. In all, there was about an hour break in the viewing. For those living in the eastern time zone of the U.S., that meant they had to stay up until 1 a.m. to see the entire ceremony.

As one who closely monitors social media, I can tell you the Twittersphere was alive with complaints. I have no idea how many, but I can you there were thousands judging by how fast the hashtags #NBC and #NBCFail kept updating. And the anger wasn’t just over the decision to cut off the Olympics; it was also over the decision to bring Jay Leno back to the Tonight Show.

Here’s a sample of the tweets going out on #NBCFail:

• wtfgerard: RT @nNoela: NBC is continuing their Winter Olympics coverage with a new downhill event. The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. #imwithcoco #nbcfail I give this tweeter credit for combining his anger on two events into one tweet.
• disappointedme: BOYCOTT LENO and his Olympic killing network. #TeamCoco #imstillwithcoco #NBCFAIL #RIKSHAZ9LIRK #SuckitNBC As a note: the hashtags “I’mwithcoco (Conan O’Brien) was the third most popular topic on Twitter Monday. That’s quite an accomplishment considering there are an estimated 50 million tweets a day.
• MONTANAinAZ: RT @ColorMeRed: Just to thank NBC for their exceptional coverage (sarc) of the Winter Olympics, my TV will be reprogrammed to everything but NBC #NBCfail This was a particularly popular tweet. I saw it at least a dozen times.
• lvnTrey: RT @ChefMark: Although sad that the Olympics is over, I’m happy that NBC’s reign of tyranny on my set is over! #NBCFail. Oh, and #shutupCostas

You get the idea. There was a lot of anger. And a lot of calls for boycotting NBC. The anger went viral pretty quickly. As I write this on Tuesday, it is still going on. If anything, the flames are burning brighter.

What surprised me is that I never saw any response from NBC to all of this. They did apparently use an application called TwitterFeed to send out positive sounding tweets about “The Marriage Ref.” TwitterFeed is an app in which you enter a bunch of tweets at one time and then schedule them to be sent out over whatever time period you want. Judging by the tweets, I would say someone decided to send a tweet about every 10 minutes.  You can often tell someone has done this because the tweets tend to be phrased alike. They stopped when several people called NBC on it.

Doing that is a violation of one of my social media rules: don’t ever pretend to be something you are not. The social media universe hates lying. And, it destroys credibility.

Getting back to my main point, I am shocked frankly that the once proud Peacock Network did nothing to calm down angry viewers. NBC is fourth place in a four-network race. They cannot afford to do something like this. This is not 15 years ago. Social media keeps things alive.

In NBC’s position, they cannot alienate their stakeholders. Those viewers have other choices. Fox, CBS, ABC and the hundreds of cable channels will all benefit from NBC’s decision not to engage with its viewers. It doesn’t appear NBC understands that. It’s sad.

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.

This rant might not resonate with you unless you live someplace where it snows a lot. I do. I live in Milwaukee, WI, a great, great city. Milwaukee is located in the northern United States. Winter can be tough here. It get’s cold and it does what it does every winter, it snows.

Snow is no surprise here. We tend to expect it to start snowing sometime around late November or early December. It keeps snowing until late March or early April – sometimes it snows into May. For those of you who live anywhere on Earth where there’s winter, I am sure the same thing happens where you live. As I said, it’s winter, it gets cold, and it snows. This has been going on for millions of years.

So, why do television stations go crazy whenever more than two inches of snow is predicted? Now, I am not talking about snow in a normally warm weather city such as Dallas, Texas or Charlotte, N.C. Snow is news there because it so rarely happens.

However, in my home city of Milwaukee, or in Chicago or Boston, snow is not news to most of us. Yet, every time the forecast calls for snow to fall, the local television stations treat the event as if aliens were invading. Broadcasts start at 4 a.m.; reporters are deployed around the area; all programming is canceled to make way for weather reports; and television meteorologists stand in front of blue screens looking very serious.

(A quick television note: the meteorologists cannot actually see that large, nifty map behind them. All they see is a blue screen. When they do the broadcast, they are looking at off-camera monitor that shows the map.)

Now, this hysteria over some snow is a result of marketing run amuck. A long time ago, some marketing consultant told some station manager that people like weather news. I always imagined the conversation happening in a bar after the station manager had consumed several adult beverages paid for by the marketer. Once the station manager was in an “agreeable” mood, the marketer told him about the “viewers like weather” idea. At this point, the station manager decided that sounded good and signed the contract the marketer shoved toward him.

The marketing guy goes to work the next morning and remakes the station’s newscast, giving weather reports way more prominence then deserved. For whatever reason, ratings rose. The marketing guy discourages doing an actual study of why ratings went up. Hey, the only change was the way the forecast was delivered, right? So, it had to be that.

Other local television station managers took note. Station managers are under constant pressure to raise ratings – their jobs often depend on it. Local news is a revenue source. So, seeing what happened to their buddy’s station, they do the same. The next thing you know, from Bangor, Maine to Portland, Oregon, television reporters are standing on street corners with rulers, measuring snow depth. Others are asking truck drivers whether icy roads are slippery. All this is done with the gravitas of reporting a major announcement from the White House.

So, when there is a normal snowfall coming, we now get hysterics instead of reasoned, normal coverage.

And I don’t think people care that much about snowstorms. I think I am like most people – all I want to know when it is going to snow and what the temperature will be. Of course, they get those wrong more than half the time.  If there is a major freeway accident, tell me about that too so I can change my route. But don’t treat it like World War III has broken out.

One final note: a very fine classic rock radio station in Milwaukee, WKLH, now has what they call “storm tracker tracker.” Basically, they make fun of the hype over the weather. I recommend listening to them. Just click on the link. You will laugh out loud.

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

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



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

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

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

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

Last Wednesday, I said Toyota was slow out of the blocks to respond to the various crises it has faced of late. I think I was blogger 10,143 to state the obvious. However, I also said the company is showing signs of regaining its equilibrium.

Note: I drive a 2000 Camry. Both my children drive Corollas.

The company is running ads in every print and broadcast outlet it can find – including a lot of radio. It has shown pictures of its idled factories to demonstrate how serious it is in identifying the accelerator and brake issues. It also has a very active presence on Facebook.

Still while this is a good start, I think the company could do more. I think they if they handled it as I suggest, they would turn a negative into a positive.

Do What Datsun Did

The first thing Toyota’s C-Suite executives should do is plan road trips to every dealer in every country where Toyota is sold. The road trippers should be Chairman Fujio Cho, Vice Chairmen of the Board Katsuaki Watanabe and Kazuo Okamo, President Akio Toyoda, and in North America, Jim Lentz, president and chief operating officer of Toyota Motor Sales, USA. If there are people who hold the same positions as Lenz in Europe, Asia, South America, the Middle East and Africa, they should also pack their bags.

They need to take a page from the handbook of retired Nissan executive Yutaka Katayama.  It was Katayama who made Datsun (which later returned to its original name of Nissan) into the first Japanese automobile success story in the United States, according to the late journalist and author David Halberstam. It was Halberstam who detailed Datsun’s success in “The Reckoning” – his account of the rise the Japanese auto industry.

Katayama lived in the United States. He traveled constantly around the U.S., meeting, customers, dealers, reporters and anyone else who talk to him. Halberstam explained that Katayama made Datsun a powerhouse because “he (Katayama) was a rare man. He brought a face to the Japanese mercantile presence; meeting him, Americans felt they knew, understood and liked the Japan that was behind his products.”

This is what Toyota’s executives should be doing. Going to every place in the world where there have been problems. Once there, they should personally apologize to their customers. They should be interviewed by the media in each city and repeat the apology. They should honestly answer the tough questions about what they knew and when they knew it. They should be speaking to every group that will listen. There should be town hall style meetings at dealerships for the customers and the general public to air grievances.

These public appearances will, in my opinion, do much to quell the anger and rebuild trust. Most people are willing to forgive a mistake, as long the one who makes the mistake sincerely apologizes.

Cut Prices

Second, a simple thing to do would to be slash prices on all models. Not a token five percent cut – a real one in the neighborhood of 25 percent. For those who have a car with a defective accelerator or brakes, give them a new car. I would throw into five years free maintenance for every car sold. Not just for oil changes and other minor things, but for all repairs from replacing a headlamp to replacing a transmission.

More Social Media

Third, I would make better use of social media than they are. Both Cho and Lenz should be blogging every week. Craig Newmark – the Craig of Craig’s List does, as does Jonathan Swartz, president and chief operating officer of Sun Microsystems and my personal favorite CEO blog, that of Southwest Airlines Gary Kelly. It has helped all three companies when they have hit rough patches. Explanations sound so much better when they come from the person in charge.

Finally, there are many, many people out there who are still strong Toyota supporters. Anecdotally, I know that because as Chester the Wonder Dog and I walk each day, I talk to Toyota owners. I have yet to find one who would get rid of their car.

I have also been on the Toyota Facebook page for U.S. owners. The level of support is amazing. Toyota needs to get those people more organized around company support. Most kind of companies would kill for that kind of support.

Put this all together and I think Toyota will be just fine.