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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Social media provides a better chance of that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So here are my keys to blogging:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In short the man is an Internet expert.

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

Incidentally, note that the power trio is all Americans.

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

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

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

Jarvis said he attended the meeting as an Internet citizen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So what should be done next?

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

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

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

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

I always go with the leader.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is what I said in reply to the request:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So it would seem at first glance that these companies are starting to embrace new ways of marketing. As most of you know, I firmly believe in melding traditional marketing and public relations with social media. That trilogy of marketing methods is the most effective.

However, I always dig a little deeper. I track these companies’ efforts. What I often find is that instead waltzing with social media, these companies are doing the “Zombie Dance.” All of you remember the Zombie Dance from the first dance you attended. The boy holds his rigid arms straight out and places them on the girl’s shoulders. Because of the distance created by the boy’s arms, the girl is forced to do the same. The pair then moves in a circle, barely lifting their feet off the ground and not bending their knees. It looks like the undead dancing.

That’s what a lot of social media attempts done by large companies especially remind me of – a stiff-armed dance that is about as a rhythmic as a drunk trying to play drums. These companies just don’t get it.

Now I know many CMOs would argue social media is not as important as search for attracting clients and customers. Current research would seem to back this contention up. For instance Google Inc.’s dominant search engine supplies about 30 percent of traffic to the top news sites, according to a study done by Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism. I would argue that same currently holds true for both business-to-consumer and business-to-business sites.

I know when I am looking for something in particular, I usually turn to Google. It is still one of the best ways to conduct research. However, the Pew study also found that “Facebook and other sharing tools, such as Addthis.com, are empowering people to rely on their online social circles to point out interesting content.” Although I do search for news, more and more I find myself reading stories friends have suggested or Linkedin. The same true when I shop. I will now often respond to tweets or Facebook friend pages when I am looking for a particular item.

This is where a lot of companies fall down, I feel. They are not integrating their social media efforts with their regular marketing efforts. Just having a Facebook page is not going to cut it. There has to be integration of all the marketing efforts. In this many companies are falling down.

Facebook is not the be all or end all. Blog, videos, and many other tools have to put to work. Yet which some notable exceptions – Dunkin Donuts and Southwest Airlines come to mind – most companies are doing all they could do. And I think I know why.

At major companies, people look at social media and consider it just too much work. Too many marketing departments are too used to using traditional advertising and public relations. It’s inertia. They want to move out of the ruts they are in. And then they wonder why they lose business to their smaller, more nimble competitors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Let me deal with those three:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chart courtesy of The Economist

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloggers note: AirTran has been acquired by Southwest Airlines. It will soon be absorbed into the Southwest network.

As I watched the Delta and AirTran pages stream out of the printer, it made me think about marketing campaigns that do essentially the same thing the two airlines did.

A lot of campaigns are just too complicated, complex, and confusing. It’s the old saw about too many cooks. Too many executives, both at the client and the agency, with different views have had to sign off on the campaign. Before each of them gives their approval, they insist on adding in what they think is important. By trying to everything to everyone, the marketing campaign ends meaning nothing to anyone.

My question always is when I see one of these campaigns, wasn’t somebody paying attention. I always think back to what Kevin Brandt, a senior executive at a Milwaukee agency, said to a class I was taking: “the words I never want to hear from my team are ‘hey, you know what would be cool … ’”

Sometimes those campaigns end up just looking stupid. Other times, they are downright insulting.

Look at the recent Kenneth Cole Twitter campaign, which coincided with the uprising in Egypt: “Millions are in an uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring is online at (sorry, but I not dignifying that with the URL). So let me get this straight, people are risking their lives to free themselves from an oppressive, brutal dictatorship. Kenneth Cole sees this as a good platform to sell shoes.

When Groupon’s incredibly insensitive Tibet Super Bowl ad was roasted worldwide, one of the defenses was that people were now talking about the discount service. Yeah, there’s a client meeting I would like to attend. “Well, I have good news. We have raised awareness of Groupon to 87 percent of the targeted audience. Isn’t that great. Of course, they all hate us and are talking about organizing boycotts, but they know who were are.”

One of my “favorites” is the ad for the gout treatment Uloric. It shows some poor schlump hauling around a giant beaker of uric acid. He gets on a bus for goodness sakes. Would you want to sit next to somebody hauling around a container of sloshing disgusting liquid? He then takes the magic drug so the beaker shrinks down to a size small enough to fit into his fishing creel. Yeah, that’s what I take along when I go fishing – something guaranteed to scare away every aquatic animal for miles.

I am not trying to minimize gout. I know it is a serious, painful, often debilitating condition. But there was no way I could focus on that while watching this guy schlep around a couple of gallons of uric acid.

While I don’t know the insides of any of those campaigns, I have worked at a major agency where I have sat in on creative meetings. I have seen what happens to a campaign when too many people get involved. What should have been a simple message about a client’s product becomes a mishmash of bad ideas and bad execution.

That’s why there is an advertising slogan I keep in mind: “Know when to say no.”

The method for turning a product into a brand is a bit like the old alchemist’s dream of turning lead into gold. Expect that converting a widget into THE WIDGET is a process that actually works.

Still, as I said last week, making that conversion is as much an art as it is a science. It involves mixing the hard sciences of research, planning, and design with the art of marketing. And make no mistake, good marketing is an art.

When I first got involved in marketing 10 years ago, I was told the rule was that public relations created a brand and advertising maintained it. It was usually a fairly long process. And although does happen sometimes, an established brand rarely goes away. There were exceptions obviously – the Ford Edsel comes to mind.

Social media has changed all of that. While it is still takes awhile to build a brand, social media can destroy a brand faster than you can say “United Breaks Guitars.”

So what has to be done in this era of social media to create a brand and make it stick in a consumer’s mind as something they need to have?

To be a successful brand, a product not only has to be different, but it has to have value in the consumer’s mind. A brand has to standout from all of the various messages a consumer it hit with. It has to convince a consumer that it will provide quality, it will be dependable and it has value. It has to convince a consumer that this product is the one which to spend money.

The obvious thing is that the campaign starts with a great product. Generally, that’s the foundation of a branding campaign. However, to this day I do not understand how the pet rock ever got popular. Sometimes there is just no accounting for taste.

Now, remember a brand does not exist until it is fixed the consumer’s mind. Until a consumer assigns value to the product and decides its different from other products, there is no brand. So the key is to convince the consumer to see the value in the product.

The product needs to be defined by what makes it unique. The brand needs to not only sell itself by what it does, but it needs to resonate emotionally with a potential customer. In addition, the product has to be able to demonstrate it delivers consistently better performance than its competitors.

That brand message has to be consistent. A lot of brands lose their mojo when for some reason; someone decides to change the messaging. All that does is confuse consumers. Confused consumers go someplace else to fulfill their needs.

The three key points of branding are:

• There needs to be a central point from which the brand flows. Think about Apple Inc. – all of its marketing focuses on creating a digital lifestyle.
• Any slogan has to agree with the central branding point. Think about the Apple IPad slogan: “Thinner. Lighter. Faster. Facetime. Smart Covers. 10 Hour Battery.” It dovetails extremely with Apple’s central branding point.
• The campaign has to define the product’s personality. Again, think about Apple. Go to any of its product’s websites. The same message resonates over and over – its products help you create a cutting edge digital lifestyle.

This where social media makes things better, and at the same, makes things a lot more dangerous. Social media can build a brand faster than any other method. But it can also destroy a brand faster than any other method.

I will talk about that next week.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is something that often trips a client up. To someone who has been working at a company, or created a product, the brand is fixed and immutable. After all they reason, they know what they created. That’s well and good for them, but to the ultimate consumer that brand doesn’t exist.

While a product is a physical thing, its brand is not. As a speaker in class I am taking said the other night: “a brand doesn’t exist until it is fixed in a customer’s mind.”

A question I have started asking clients after hearing several speakers make this point is: “why would a customer want to buy your product?” Not why you want them to buy it, but why they should want it?

What a marketing agency has to do is create a consistent message about the product. The message helps a company create its image, its brand. It is that branding that lures a customer into making a purchase.

An important point to this is that after that the initial shot, the message and the image always have to be in sync. If there is any kind of disconnect, consumers will notice and turn to another brand. Companies often destroy their brands when they stray from their core message.

Here are the test questions every marketing person should be asking about their brand messaging: “is it true, is it believable, is it unique?” I didn’t invent that test, but I like it so I am using it. What the marketing plan should is make a product something people want to talk about.

As Milwaukee marketing executive Kevin Brandt said: “if you say something entirely new, entirely different, people will pay money to listen.”

Here’s an example that illustrates the point. I grew up near Troy, N.Y., which when I was young was the home of Arrow shirts. The shirt manufacturer, Cluett Peabody & Company, Inc. was an independent company until the 1980s.

In the early part of the 20^th century, a very strong brand was created around “The Arrow Collar Man.” According to Wikipedia “the Arrow Collar ads were a collaborative production of New York ad agency Calkins and Holden; Cluett, Peabody advertising director Charles Connolly; and commercial illustrator J. C. Leyendecker. Leyendecker’s model was his live-in companion, a Canadian named Charles Beach.

“Hundreds of printed advertisements were produced from 1907 to 1931 featuring the Arrow Collar Man. The fictional Arrow collar man became an icon and by 1920 received fan mail. President Theodore Roosevelt referred to him as a “superb portrait of the common man.” He inspired a Broadway musical Helen of Troy in 1923.” The message kept resonating long after the actual campaign stopped.

The Arrow Collar Man

Skip forward about 35 years. When I was about five or six, my parents bought me my first suit. To go with it, we drove over to Cluett, Peabody’s headquarters in Troy to buy an Arrow shirt from their outlet store. It seems to me they had children’s sizes. That first dress shirt instilled in me a strong love of button-down shirts that continues to this day, but I digress.

That was the first of many trips to Troy for dress shirts. I must have been about 16 or so when I first noticed that Arrow wasn’t the only shirt label being sold at the outlet. Along one wall were shirts with labels that included such names Marshall Fields, Filenes, Woodward & Lothrop, Abraham & Strauss. I knew those were department store names. There were many other such labels.

I asked one of the workers there what the difference was between those shirts and the ones with the Arrow labels. If memory serves, he told he there wasn’t much. Maybe a slightly bigger or smaller collar, or a different shade of blue, but essentially the shirts were the same.

Yet, I couldn’t buy one. I had to have an Arrow shirt. There was something about that label, about that Arrow image, that I wanted and had to have. That brand spoke to me. The idea that I would ever look anything like the idealized Arrow man is laughable. Yet, I would only wear those shirts because they bestowed the image of a self-confident, successful man.

That image created at the beginning of the 20^th Century had carried through to the late 1960s. It made myself and thousands of other men want that shirt because of that brand image.

That’s the definition of brand positioning. A good marketing agency will work hard to establish a brand such as the Arrow shirt. Next week I will take you behind the curtains to show how its done. Although be warned, creating a brand is more of an art than a science.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wikipedia entry best explains what is a SWOT analysis:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My wife and I recently had an experience that drove that point home. It was a small incident involving a surly clerk. However, the same thing could easily happen to your business. In that case it might not be such a small incident. It could cost you a major customer. That is never a good thing.

Let me explain. My wife and I are wine aficionados. Recently we were at our favorite wine store, picking up an order and buying some wine for my wife’s book club. While we there, my wife wondered if they had more of really good red wine we had recently purchased. Neither of us could remember the name. But we knew it was a red and we knew it had a snake on the label.

So while I went to get the pre-ordered wine from another part of the store, a clerk headed off to search. While he was looking, my wife was one aisle over. As she browsed, she could hear the clerk complaining. “Why don’t people know what the name of the wine they are looking for,” the clerk said. He went on in this vein for several minutes. Mind you, he wasn’t muttering. My wife heard him quite clearly.

He never did find the wine, which wasn’t really that big of a deal. We knew it was a shot in the dark. Now, the manager apologized, and asked us  to call when we had the name so he could make sure he had the vintage. His attitude was much different from the clerk’s. That’s how you should handle a customer’s request.

I didn’t find out about this clerk’s complaining until we were in the car. Frankly, his attitude bothered me. That is not how you deal with customers. You do not verbalize your feelings in any way. You go out of your way to fulfill their requests. That is true whether you are a mom and pop store or a multi-billion company.

Before someone out there gets on me for not understanding life in retail, I should tell you my first job where I got paid a regular wage was in a grocery store. As I have written before store owner John Fanning drilled into us that the customer is always right. There are no exceptions to that rule.

I also worked as a bike mechanic a few years ago. People seemed to trust the mechanics more than the sales people. So we did quite a bit of selling. We always gave honest answers and advice no how silly question might have seemed. We knew that customer might be buying a high-end bicycle. The cost of such a bike could easily be over $3,000. We did not want to do anything to affect that sale. Those sales paid our salary.

So let’s blow my spouse’s scenario up a bit. Instead of a wine shop, she is a buyer for a major corporation. Her company is creating a second product line. It’s needs a customized widget, so it calls the company that had been supplying its widgets for decades. Since this is a new product, the specifications are still somewhat fuzzy.

Instead of getting the help she needs, my wife gets complaints from the supplier’s sales manager. The part is too difficult to make, or it will months to design and produce. That delay with the throw the buyer’s production schedule way off. Not a good thing.

Without naming any names, I know of companies that have run into this situation. What do you think they do? Of course, they find another supplier.

Sometimes the supplier make it even worse by complaining about it in a public way, like that wine store clerk did. That’s really dumb. Now, not only is the company likely to lose a customer, that customer is going to tell others what a bunch of jerks run that supplier. Probably more customers and sales lost. That means less money in the till.

So, if you have issues with a customer or client, go in the closet, close the door and scream. Just make sure the room is soundproof.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Groupon\’s Tibet Commercial

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is micro-marketing? According to Answers.com, it’s “Designing, creating, and manufacturing products, marketing, and advertising campaigns for the benefit of very specific geographic, demographic, or psychographic segments of the consumer market.”

In other words, micromarketing means selling to your neighbors.

My exposure to micromarketing began when I came home the other day to find a plastic bag on the front steps. That’s not unusual – somebody is always leaving phone books or fliers or something else on the steps. Most of the time the bag avoids the house completely on its trip to the recycling bin in the garage.

This time the bag contained a dog food sample and two dog biscuits. As Chester the Wonder Dog has a voracious appetite, I always appreciate free food. Biscuits are good, too. He is more cooperative when he knows there’s a reward when I expect him to something.

The bag came from a local pet store called Hounds Around Town. Along with the food, there were two fliers inside the bag. On one there was an eight-paragraph explanation of the food – how it was made locally without any artificial ingredients. There were also a couple of paragraphs about Hounds Around Town, including an invitation to bring my dog whenever I wanted.

Also in the packet was a sheet from a group called the 3/50 project. This really caught my attention. I went to the group’s website and found this explanation from Consumer Reports:

“The 3/50 Project is a campaign to support local merchants. The concept has spread to communities nationwide, and its premise is simple: First, choose three local independent brick-and-mortar businesses—clothing shops, food stores and restaurants, and for the home, independent appliance retailers, hardware stores, and garden centers—that you find essential and want to keep from going under during the recession. During tight times like these, independent retailers suffer since budget-minded consumers are more inclined to shop at chain stores and big-box behemoths.

Then spend $50 or more among those places each month. If enough people in a town make the pledge, the theory goes, the pooled-together funds will prop up mom-and-pop enterprises and help sustain local business districts.”

The sheet quoted the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in noting that if just half the U.S. working population spent $50 each month in locally owned businesses, more than $42.6 billion in revenue would be generated. It also said that for every $100 spent in independently owned stories, $68 returns to the community through taxes, payroll and other expenditures. When a purchase is made from a national chain, $43 stays in a local community. When an online purchase is made nothing stays behind.

Powerful arguments on both counts. In fact, it affected me and that doesn’t usually happen. After all, marketing is what I do for a living. I have seen every kind of campaign that’s ever been done. Most either make me cringe or yawn.

However, this campaign made me think. I do like to shop locally as much as possible and I like products to buy that are made locally. I firmly believe that the only way we are going to dig ourselves out of this recession is to support each other. I have no faith that the politicians who spread all this rhetoric are going to do anything that will actually solve the problem.

In this case, if Chester likes the dog food the odds are good I will shop at Hounds Around Town. This a dog who likes to eat squirrels, rabbits and other small animals, so I don’t think his palate is that discerning.

It is also an instructive example of for small businesses. Many small retailers just don’t have the budget to advertise or do much marketing. Buying a newspaper ad or producing a television commercial can be expensive. Plus, those efforts are more of a shotgun approach. A microcampaign such as the one Hounds Around Town ran can be much more effective because the market is very targeted. It is a very good idea.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is no alternative, no other option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HowHH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My special thanks to Heather Ayisanbi for superb editing.

Peace  Pace  سلام שלום     Hasîtî     शान्ति      Barış     和平     Мир 

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

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

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

1. Extensive experience

2. Innovative

3. Motivated

4. Results-oriented

5. Dynamic

6. Proven track record

7. Team player

8. Fast-paced

9. Problem solver

10. Entrepreneurial

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

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

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

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

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

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

This piece’s headline is my professional mantra. I operate in three complimentary, and often overlapping, areas: social media, public relations and marketing. It is my firm rule when working in any of those areas that I am there to further my clients aims, not my own.

Too often I see other companies that operate in the same areas who don’t adhere to that rule. That bothers me. I think they’ve forgotten that they there to serve the clients, not themselves. I am not going to name any names. It just isn’t right. It gives my entire profession a bad name.

Let me tell you how I view the relationship between client and agency.

When a client hires me, the first thing I tell them is they are going to be their company’s face. The reason is simple – they are the best representatives. Since the person is usually a senior executive, they are going to know far more about the place that I will. Plus hopefully the enthusiasm they have for their employer will show through. If they don’t have that kind of enthusiasm, perhaps they should think about working someplace else.

The primary objection to that idea that I hear from clients about that is “well, I don’t how to handle myself in front of the news media and public.” This is where many agency types trip. They take the executive’s words at face value and make themselves the spokesman. Now it is as much about them as it is the client.

It is very frustrating to most journalists when the subject doesn’t know the answer. When I was a reporter, I would make it point to go around some public relations people. I needed information and I knew that the public relations person would have to ask someone for it. Most of the time that process took too long. So I identified who had the information I needed and called them.

That does not apply, by the way, to in-house public relations counsel. They are almost always very knowledgeable.

When a client tells me they are nervous about being out front that to me I reply: “don’t worry, I can train you to handle yourself.” I spent over two decades as a working journalist. I know how interviews go. I can take an executive through just about every scenario that will be encountered. I know them all because I use to create them all.

Where I do step in is arranging coverage. As I said, I worked a reporter for a long time. I know how to approach a reporter in a way that gives the client best chance at coverage.

That’s another thing that bothers me – agencies that guarantee coverage. No one should ever do that. What a lot of agencies don’t seem to understand is that media outlets have different needs and agendas than their clients. It is much easier to make a client’s needs conform to the media outlet than the other way around. What I mean by that it’s better to pitch a story in a format that the outlet use rather than conforming to the client’s outline.

The bottom line is agencies should realize they are planners and counselors. They should stay out of the spotlight. It is their job to make the client look good, not to pump themselves up.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As an aside, I was told by my professors three decades ago we would living in a paperless society by now. But a lot of trees are still dying.

Be that as it may, it seems to me these companies are working very hard to make me their friend. But once I acquiesce, that’s the last I hear from them. Oh, I might get the occasional email telling me about a sale or something, but that’s it. They don’t post anything on Facebook, they don’t blog and if they do tweet, it gets buried among all the other tweets I get.

Or even worse, they send me snail mail fliers. I don’t like junk mail. Maybe it is because my mother was a mail carrier. She used to complain how much weight the junk mail added to her bag. She knew that most of the people on her route were just going to toss them anyway. It seemed ridiculous to her to have to schlep all those ads all over the place.

It seems silly to me to have a company ask me online for information so they can mail me something. That shows a complete lack of understanding of social media.

What I think is happening is that somebody told the CMO, or even the CEO, that the company needs to have a presence on the Web. But once they have that presence, they don’t know what to do with it. Maybe it’s fear, maybe it’s ignorance, or maybe it’s just laziness.  Whatever the reason, they are letting a fantastic opportunity just lay there. I cannot believe they don’t know how effective social media can be when done properly. That has been demonstrated over and over again.

They could also be causing themselves problems. The social media universe demands interaction. It is one of the cores of social media. If there is no interaction, people will go away. They will look to a competitor who better understands what to do with social media.

I think CMOs and CEOs want it both ways. They want to continue to use the old methods. Those methods are not as effective as they once were, but it’s something they still understand. There is always a fear of the unknown.

Still, they know they need to do something in the area of social media. Yet, they don’t want invest the time it takes to do it right. So they stay in the shallow end of the pool. As I already said, that’s wrong place to be. The only thing they are accomplishing is crippling their own company’s efforts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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