| If there’s one thing I wish for you this year, its to not act to this point of desperation. More on SEO later…for now enjoy reading this. | |
| EMAIL: Remove Your Site From Google or I’ll Sue | MakeUseOf.com Source: makeuseof.com |
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Ellen's Plot for World Domination
Interested to see how this social media campaign flies. I’m a fan of Ellen but I am not sure if I would follow these instructions to help her achieve “world domination”. I mean, in a way, she’ll be closer to reaching that goal just by being the highly anticipated new judge on American Idol. But I ask, when I come across these types of Social Marketing Call-to-action campaigns, what is the goal and what is the incentive?
If the goal is to find and target her quality, loyal fans, then this might work. If she’s looking to garner more fans, she may run into some difficulty. Why? The call to action asks for a lot: download, print, cut out, pose, take a picture, upload on Facebook. That’s a lot – for what incentive? Ellen’s attention and maybe a chance to be featured on her show? I don’t know. Interesting to note that this campaign was launched 2 days ago and I find no uploaded photos on her page yet.
How could have this call to action been tweaked?
- something more specific about the picture
- creating it into a contest – “Best Picture will be featured on My show”
- less about Ellen and more about her fans – ask to tell Ellen their wants for 2010 and maybe Ellen can help with one of the wishes this year.
Keys to social media call to action campaigns – be they non profit donation appeals or marketing stunts like this: Make the call about your fans, Make what they need to pass around cool in itself (passing around a picture looks really “markety”), and Make it SIMPLE and/or FUN to participate.
Another helpful and very obvious thing to do would be to add a link or announcement of the campaign on the Facebook page itself. Could not find it anywhere on Ellen’s FB page which is where it should have started. Instead the call stays on the corporate site.
I'm a bit ritualistic with New Years. I tend to crave for a new calendar or journal every start of the year to plan plan plan. I am like the Monica Geller of planning – which can be a good or bad thing. Good because I tend to never procrastinate. Bad, because I sometimes spend so much time planning, and less time actually executing. That 80/20 Pareto's law really does hold true in this case.
This is a great time to assess what worked this past year, what didn't and how to redirect your energies. What is that 20% of your work that produces 80% of the results in your life or business? Here's a radical approach to planning that I want to share as you evaluate: I recently ran across an old post from lifehacker that talked about Jerry Seinfeld's method for using his calendar to keep him faithful to his writing regimen. His method?:He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and hang it on a prominent wall. The next step was to get a big red magic marker.
He said for each day that I do my task of writing, I get to put a big red X over that day. "After a few days you'll have a chain. Just keep at it and the chain will grow longer every day. You'll like seeing that chain, especially when you get a few weeks under your belt. Your only job next is to not break the chain."
"Don't break the chain," he said again for emphasis.
For plan-o-holics like me, failure is painful and constant. Painful because we plan too many steps or projects, and constant becuase…well..we plan too many steps or projects. Is planning just a form of procrastination? Rooted in the fear of failure or imperfection? If planners are so afraid of failure, maybe the "Don't break the chain," method is just what we need, or revise that…all that we need. If I see a red chain in my living room that's threatened to break because of my inconsistency – I would DO something.
What is it about your year you don't want to break? What's a practice, or skill' or material you don't want to lose? What habit do you want to form? Much of PR is skills oriented – not much need for technical know how really – it's a people business. You are what you produce, network, and finesse. Here are some PR related habits I myself would like to cultivate, but I think the key is simplicity so I will probably start with just one of these, but feel free to hi jack any of these for your own practice. – Read and comment on a blog related to PR Social Media everyday- Touch one different person a day in my social and professional network
- Blog or Status Update at least once a day
- Read trade news in a new target industry With that, do what Seinfeld says – Don't double dip, and don't break the chain.
Photo Source
The All Facebook Blog said it: Facebook is the most visited site in U.S. this Christmas.
No surprises here. 2009 was a great year for Facebook as it continued to sweep popularity across several online age groups. Personally, I observed a quick uptake amongst those in my mother’s generation, many of her sisters joining in and updating their status updates more frequently than their own kids. Retrieving pictures is now fun, interactive, and social. From one Christmas party, three different Facebook albums emerged. Gone are the times when we had to email large attachments to each other, check each email for any sly responses from that funny uncle who always has something witty to say. Facebook automates and enriches the photo sharing experience.
The most rewarding experience by far I’ve had on Facebook (which I was not expecting) was when my own father (who lives in the Philippines and whom I’ve been trying for years to coax into the digital age of basic email correspondence) notified me that eve HE was on Facebook. Not only was he typing messages and uploading pictures, he was playing Farm Ville! Which G4′s Attack of the Show claimed is one of the most addictive online games today. Suddenly, Facebook has my Dad typing, surfing, and sharing online content. Facebook is providing a comfortable entry point for late users of online tools.
Aside from photo sharing and connecting with long-distance family and friends, Facebook helps build that “loose tie” that Malcolm Gladwell talks about in The Tipping Point. The “Connectors” of this world, as Gladwell calls them, possess an amazing talent of maintaining the loose tie with friends and acquaintances. Remembering birthdays, “poking” someone you haven’t spoken to in a while, offering encouragement or passing a joke – all great ways Facebook helps make Connectors of us all. Although remember, Facebook is like any tool, without the genuine “human” backing behind messages and sentiments you share, ties can become too loose.
So, why is this a good thing? Your online, social network savvy audience has just grown. It’s grown a lot in 2009. It will grow even more.
That means that social media and networking tools and protocols – file sharing, comment threads, online profile researching – are becoming more familiar to the growing online audience. More people will understand what you mean when you ask them to “upload a video sharing your enthusiasm about x, y, z.” or “please contribute to this wiki so we can all share our knowledge about ‘esoteric topic x’” – Social networks like Facebook help educate and create social media fluency, and that’s why it has stolen Christmas but will probably give back to marketers and PR folks three-fold.
Of course there’s some downsides:
- Some folks have gotten fired from the use of Facebook, others have lost political candidacy. Privacy settings are often overlooked by beginners and veterans alike. Faux Pas run rampant online and can be republished and spread quickly. Beware and check your privacy settings.
- Facebook’s attention and uptake has prompted the cluttering of advertisements and applications. The plethora of all the invites to games like Farm Ville or Cafe World or the “I sent you a virtual drink, can you please send one back to me” nonsense builds up an immunity amongst many online users. I would love it if there was some way to social bookmark the apps that were really worth your time so I can sift through the clutter.
- Time suckage. Yep, it takes time to water your patch of onions on Farm Ville, but the time networking with friends, family and colleagues, in view is not time wasted. Learn the language and tone others you admire set on Facebook, use that to develop your own voice, and you will have begun the patient work it takes to earn social media & social networking fluency.
After writing my quick post on Google’s announcement regarding their realtime search to include Facebook fan page updates, it made me reminisce on the never ending saga of PR vs. Journalists. Ironically, PR folks lose in their own PR battle when it comes to their relationship with the media.
I often wonder whether social media can become the one mechanism that could help bridge PR folks and Journalists together. A chasm exists between the two due to the nature of the media world. I wonder if PR professionals who participate in social media tools (blogging, vlogging, podcasting, etc.) could somehow find a way to break that barrier.
I’ve been in many a debate regarding this issue, once challenging an entire panel of journalists and PR folks in San Francisco during a 1 hour talk entitled something like “Can We All Get Along?” I had high hopes. I thought, “Finally! We are going to get to the bottom of all this nonsense and find out why there’s such a stigma about being in PR sometimes, and why journalists, generally, are pestered by our existence.
Unfortunately, after about 30 minutes of talk from the panel, it became like any other “Journalist/PR workshop” or a “How to pitch a journalist” panel. Every recommendation on “how to get along” apparently was give to the PR folks. We were the only ones committing crimes against the relationship. Though I agree we can be pestering, I didn’t buy it.
I then asked the question no one wanted to: Why do we have to do all the work to mend the relationship? Don’t you need us too?
The panel and crowd perked up. The reaction was amazing. I think I even heard a few chuckles around the crowd. The panel one by one began responding to me, but the basic sentiment was this:
“That’s honestly how it’s gonna be. You work for clients who pay you to chase us and hound us. You have to be the ones to mend your ways and the bridges you burn or half-burn with the media.”
It may not have been the answer I wanted, but it sure made me happy to hear it, as what was very interesting to see was that PR folks on the same panel accepted this set up as a given. I think that this low morale is a big cause for high turn overs in the PR world. At the end of the day, you don’t want to be called a glorified telemarketer and spammer. No fun. PR pros do so much more than just pitch, and yet bad pitches are sometimes all they are remembered for. Again, shooting the messenger is easiest.
Since that workshop I always wondered if PR folks’ embrace of social media could help dispel some of these misconceptions or at least make the conversation more open. It may also help us not have to make bad pitches.
Imagine, a PR pro so known in the world of journalism (or at least their specific client’s beat, say Hi-Tech reporters) that these reporters check out the PR pro’s blog just to see if there’s something interesting they could write on. No need to ever do the cold pitch to the journalist. Maybe all they need to do is subscribe to an RSS. If they see something interesting, they can ping the PR blogger. Set up the interview. And everyone’s happy.
That’s my pipe dream. I hope my blog can help facilitate that somehow, or find a way where social media can benefit the PR industry itself, rather than just PR clients’ industries.
Can we make it happen? Help me experiment. Start a blog and see : ) then tell me about it. Better give me credit for the idea though. Or I’ll hunt you down. haha. I DO know karate…but more on that in another post.
One GREAT reason to get a FB Fan Page Now!
If you haven’t heard, Google announced this past Dec. 7th that it will be offering realtime search for public Facebook pages. This means amazing SEO potential for FB fan pages devoted to actors, aspiring musicians, small businesses, and other organizations. Maybe even PR proessionals themselves.
Google will also be including MySpace to its realtime search, but with Facebook’s preferred interface and MySpace’s dwindling popularity, I expect this move by Google could make Facebook the first-stop, if not one-stop, site for corporate or entertainment social media activity and initial experiments.
If you want to start a Fan Page,go here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php
You can create a page even if you have no FB account. You could also create a page disassociated with your FB account by registering it under a different email address. If you’re thinking, “Wait. Wait. Wait, Tallulah. I don’t want to publish anything yet. I don’t even HAVE a profile picture.” No worries. You can check a box during the registration process that opts to keep the fan page unpublished until you are ready. Might as well get dibs on your fan page name, right?
And, if you want to hear my pipe dream on PR pro’s use of social media to mend the eternal struggle between PR and the media, here’s a post that just came out.
Small Budget. Big Results. This is the Inspired Hustler's Ideal.
A friend asked me once for a DIY PR outreach To Do List. She aimed to get a few local pubs to cover her comedy troupe’s show, and thought it would be great to share some quick, really bare boned, steps to abide by. Without going into too much detail, because I’ve already spent too much time on WordPress today, here’s a breakdown:
- Write a press release: Formatting and tone changes how you go about this. I would sleuth the net, or popular news wires, for an example to follow.
- Have a target list of media (print, online, radio, tv): PR folks have tools for this stuff, both from $0 – $blasphemous. Check first the pubs that come to mind for you, but be realistic. Look for the low hanging fruit. PRLeads is $99 a month, but would only suggest that to business owners who can front the capital. Peter Shankman’s HARO is fun and free.
- Send it out 3wks – 4 wks in advance (since it’s Dec, it’s busy, so the earlier the better). In the media world, better to be early and persistent, than late and oh so sorry.
- Follow up via phone call n book some interviews or reviewers, whichever applies. Here’s a post on how to pitch even the BIG Shot reporter on your first try.
- Post Release on distribution wire on target date. There are a few free press release drop sites out there, but I’ve only tried one: PRLog. Not bad in helping increase SEO for your site and as well as web visibility for your comedy troupe’s or business name.
- Collect results for future marketing, and maintain relationships with the press you’ve worked with. If you haven’t already, set up a Google Alert now. Never know what someone might already be saying. Besides, everyone in the world may Google themselves, but we sophisticated Inspiration-Hustlers Google Alert. Why not automate your search querying?
That is a basic basic list of things to do with a basic basic announcement. Of course the key is in the first two: writing the release and figuring out the angle that would make it newsworthy (the Inspiration), and secondly making a fine tuned list of reporters/outlets who would love this story and have the most potential for writing it (the Hustle).
Good luck and tell me how it goes!