PR 101

Look on the upper right corner of this blog. You will see a widget marked My Community. That’s Google Friend Connect. What is it – well the short answer is that’s a way for you and I to connect. It links the various social sites – Facebook, Digg, MySpace and all the others – into a single chain. It eliminates the silos.

The long answer is Google Friend Connect is the latest example of how Social Media is changing everything we do. It is fulfilling the predictions made two decades ago of how the Web was going to remake society.

Therefore, for those of us in marketing and public relations, Social Media is not a game changer. It is a whole new game, with new rules, new plays and a new scoring system.

Consider this: the number of people using social media has surpassed the number of people surfing for pornography. Don’t laugh – until 2008, pornography was the number use of the web. Pornography companies were the first to make a profit on the Internet.

Why has Social Media taken off? What Social Media has done is make it easy for anyone to communicate and share information. People can now share anything with anyone: they create groups with similar interests, or they just shotgun blast it out onto the web.

What does this have to with marketing and public relations? Let me give you an example.

Last November, an advertisement ran that equated wearing baby slings with back and neck pain. The cure? Take the painkiller Motrin®. The hundreds of thousands of mothers and fathers who carry their children that way were not amused. They attacked using every Social Media method available: emails campaigns; blogs; comments on Facebook and other friend site; and most importantly Twitter.

There were thousands of tweets from angry moms. As blogger Laura Fitton explains, by using Twitter those Moms killed the campaign. And they got Johnson and Johnson to apologize. This happened in about 16 hours. To paraphrase a current television commercial, “that’s the power of social media baby!”

I am not the first person to say this, but maybe I am the first person to say it to you. What’s happening is there are now literally millions of people all over the world who are having conversations about all kinds of things. Three of those topics are the products they buy, the companies that produce the products and the places from which they make their purchases.

If a customer has a bad experience with the product or is angry about the service, it is very simple to tell hundreds of thousands of people almost instantaneously. A company’s reputation, customer base, and market share could be destroyed in a day or less. Frightening, isn’t it?

In the old days (25 years ago), if a company angered a customer, what was the customer going to do? Write a letter that would be read by some low level person who would send back a form letter. The original letter would usually be filed under “ignore.” Tell everyone they knew? Even assuming the six degrees of separation thing is accurate, at most a couple of hundred people might hear about the issue. That’s not enough to make a CEO drop an extra ice cube into the scotch glass.

This is what the “conversation” used to look like:

Company  —————————>  Customer

It was all one way. The company had the upper hand. It lectured, it didn’t converse.

This is what it looks like today:

Courtesy of Brian Solis: http://www.briansolis.com

Now, the customer will probably email the company. But, they are also just as likely to post on something on Facebook or Twitter. If others find what was said interesting, they will forward the post to others. Others will join in the conversation. See what can happen.

As Business Week put it in a May 7 article: “Once wedded to a single networking platform, a member’s “social graph”–password, profile, list of friends–is becoming portable. In other words, as they surf the Web, users increasingly will be able to define themselves by their social network of origin.

“That’s big. It signals that Web companies are no longer in a race to build “destination sites” that attract vast numbers of users. Instead, social networking players are racing to extend their influence over the entire Web by exporting their social features to all sites.”

As a marketer, you want to be right in the middle, in the space marked conversation. That conversation is going to happen whether you or your client is part of it. It is much better to the middle, listening and influencing the flow. Influencing the conversation is the key. If you provide timely, accurate information, you have control. If you answer complaints in a timely, accurate manner, you have control. But you got be a part of the conversation.

Here’s something to consider about some of the social media sites.

Social Media Matrix

I defy any marketer to reach and engage a group that size without Social Media. It cannot be done any other way.

Now, while Social Media can kill a brand, it can also build one. Smart companies have realized that. A search in Twibs.com, the Twitter business directory, turned up more than 12,000 companies using Twitter. The really smart ones, such as Zappos and Apple, constantly monitor the mini-blogging service. Seeing a way to overtake rival Cole, Pepsi is moving into social media in a very big way.

However, these companies are not just listing themselves on these sites – they are joining in the conversation. They engage with customers, monitor for problems and introduce new products. They also link to company information, company blogs and other information.

As social marketing expert Simon Ford says: think of this as a party. Do want to go to a dull, boring party where the host is barely visible and expects you to entertain yourself? What usually happens then is the rowdies take over – think spam.

What you to do, Ford explains, is engage with your guests. You want to give them a reason to stay at the party. You do that by providing interesting content. You blog about a new product, or you will deal with a customer complaint. If you do that, you will have a better chance of succeeding.

Oh, by the way, join me on Google Friend Connect. Become part of the Social Media movement.

Next week, I will write about how I think you should get started on social media.

I post this every Monday. As a new feature, if you have questions you would like me to answer, please email me. I am always looking for topics and input. My email address is in the next paragraph.

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My background: I worked as a reporter for 25 years in central Illinois, upstate New York, suburban Detroit and Milwaukee. I now help clients with marketing communications through my company – JJC Communications LLC. If you want to know more about my company, and myself, click the link. It’s a cliché, but it’s true for me: no job is too big, no job is too small. I have worked with companies on the Fortune 500 list and I have worked with companies that have one employee. The service I provide is the same for all.

Email me at jjcole54@gmail.com