PR 101

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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.”

That social media is becoming one of the dominant forms of marketing is not debatable, I feel. However, just because that’s happening doesn’t mean companies are willing to by into it. What I am finding that is chief marketing officers and their neighbors in the C-Suite are in a “show-me” mode. They need to be convinced that social media does what we practitioners say it does.

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.

I run into to this all the time from potential clients. They tell me they have hired a web designer who has built a website geared for search engine optimization. I always congratulate them on doing that because an SEO-enabled webpage is part of a successful social media campaign.

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.