Five words your communications team should never utter

"Now what do we do?"

If you're a marketer and you have heard of the "Domino's Video", you likely have given some thought to what would you do in Domino's situation. So, what did you come up with?

Word of mouth tips and flames spread globally within minutes. You have to react. Doing nothing is clearly the wrong action to take. So what would you do?

If you think because you're not currently using social media marketing tactics to promote your brand or product, that your brand is not at risk - you are ignoring today's marketing realities.

Whether you are actively engaged online or not - you are sending a message to your consumer. Those who think that social media is trivial or a fad or something to be avoided, are totally missing the bigger opportunity! Yes, marketers are faced with risks that present challenges for them online. But the rewards online are far greater. Today's online culture is a modern marketer's dream!

The Opportunity:

A good social media/online media strategy will outline initiatives to create real value for all the major stake holders: goodwill for the brand, value for the customer, buzz for PR, outlets for marketing, revenue for sales, and support for customer service. Additionally, campaigns and the media itself should offer ways for the end user to engage with a brand in meaningful ways and reward that engagement and promote all of the above!

The web is social now. That's what "Web 2.0" has been all about - we're all on the bleeding edge of Web 3.0, as cloud computing becomes standard and mobile cross pollinates with the internet more and more - you had better catch up!

If you don't yet have an answer to the Domino's question - consider taking this step: Gather the team, talk with your trusted agency partner and work together to develop your crisis communication plan.

If you think social media is separate from online media - again - come talk with us. The web is social media, your consumers are online and today, they expect that brands are online and engaged, too. We have the tools to show you what people are saying about your brand, your team, your products and to help you to first, listen and then to join their conversation where it makes the most sense for you to do so.

Search Engine Strategies New York (#SESNY)

What an incredible first day at SES – and for none of the reasons I expected. The day started off with Guy Kawasaki telling us how he spams everyone, yet people love him. The woman 2 seats over from me fell asleep in her chair and was snoring loud enough for 4 rows over to hear. 30 minutes later I found out that she was the lead speaker in the next session I sat in on! Then the first three session breakouts I attended talked about Twitter twice as much as they did search strategy (I proposed a name change to TES over lunch – but the conference went on as SES). I watched a panel on Universal search that included Ask, Yahoo, Live Search and more – but Google was no where to be found. The final session I sat in was incredible – and it was led by CMO’s discussing do’s and dont’s of search…

If you aren’t following me on twitter, you can do so at http://twitter.com/mediatwo and I’ll be live tweeting Day 2 as well. But here’s a few more details on first and last sessions I sat in on:

SES NY Key Note: Guy Kawasaki
Guy kicked off the day with the keynote speech. As he was speaking I was twittering and noticed that he was too… Only he wasn’t near his computer??? As he spoke deeper, he revealed that he spams people, he uses ghost writers, he doesn’t pay attention to anyone that follows him unless they D or @ him. He also revealed his ultra scientific way of coming up with his “non-automated” post-topics: randomly grab links that sound interesting from a couple sites (one being Alltop.com – his own). With all of this information in the palm of my hand – I still choose to follow him on twitter (as do 90,000+ others). I know – it sounds crazy – but you know what – he’s a very likable guy. That, and he revealed some very useful tools that I re-tweeted earlier in the day including:
• www.Twibs.com helps you monitor companies
• www.Retweetist.com Good gauge of how many people are RT you.
• www.epenis.nl. Check out that site! It's your twitter penis size!
• www.adjix.com it shows stats for your links
• www.Twirl.com allows you to monitor multiple twitter accounts in the same window.
• www.cotweet.com is for multiple tweeting companies.
• www.Tynt.com quotes the original source when copied.
• www.Twitterhawk.com "the ultimate spamming tool". Looks for keywords and auto tweets content.
• www.twitterfeed.com allows you to post to others twitter - huge opportunity to build affiliates. It is a custom feature "beg Mario"

Dozen most common search engine mistakes that CMO's make
I must admit, I was pleasantly surprised by this panel. My objective from this conference was to get a pulse on what CMO’s thought of search and interactive. As immersed as I am personally in interactive strategy, I sometimes find myself talking over clients – and in particular, C-Level types. I went to this session because the panel consisted of top-level marketers from brands such as Ameriprise, World Travel Holdings, Constant Contact, and more – and I felt like this would be a great representation to CMO’s everywhere. Well – if it is – then congratulations CMO’s – you get interactive! The reality is, this was a group of seasoned veterans that understood their marketing mix, and there is a lot that can be learned from them. Below are the 12 mistakes that they pointed out during their session:
1. Failing to set measurable goals.
2. Failing to assign monetary values to each action
3. Assessing the SEM success Solely on a direct marketing model
4. Treating SEO as a project rather than a process
5. Making a #1 ranking your most important objective
6. Focusing on big keywords and forgetting the long-tail
7. Engaging in paid or natural but not both
8. Using your language and not that of your customers
9. Optimizing your web site but not other digital assets
10. Integrate SEM with your other marketing initiatives - don't silo it
11. Failing to bid on terms for which your site already organically ranks high
12. Bidding solely on branded terms

All-in-all – I’m looking forward to day 2! I’m not sure what to expect, but I’m looking forward to it…

Building a Social Media Strategy

The terms “social media” have seemingly overtaken “emerging media” for the new catch-all that ad agencies are pitching to their clients. The reality is, social is part of emerging, but I tend to think that when people don’t fully understand something such as Twitter they want to lump it into a general category so they can speak to a broader topic and not get questioned on specifics. With that being said, I’d like to take you into a hypothetical social strategy, but first, I want to identify for you the 5 elements Media Two categorizes are mandatory for your strategy to be successful:

1. Identify Personality. Although Media Two will do all of the heavy lifting, the brand personality should come from within your organization. As a brand cannot speak, this person will be the spokesperson for your brand. The only way to not come off as fake is to be real – not a made up agency person or avatar. We want you to interact in a way that only you know how.

2. Set up brand monitoring. Using a software such as Radian6 Media Two will identify what your current social buzz is, and identify a benchmark plan with ROI objectives in place so that you can see what your actual return on investment will be.

3. Identify Strategy & Opportunities. Depending on where your industry buzz is taking place, whether its blogs, communities, micro-blog’s, news outlets, video, etc – we will identify and define a strategy designed to hit your ROI objectives as previously defined. For example, if we see that you have a strong following in the Twitter community, we will set up a strategy that continues to bolster that.

4. Competitive Analysis. We will keep you updated on what people are saying about your competitors as well. Part of our strategy may even be to go after individuals with our strengths and benefits upon finding dissatisfaction with your competitor’s products or services.

5. Protecting Your Brand Identity. As new trends hit the airwaves, we know that you have other things going on. Media Two will continue to monitor the trade shows, tweet-up’s and what have you to identify where you should be protected. We recommend registering any brand URL’s, Facebook accounts, LinkedIn groups, Twitter names, Instant Messaging names, and Gmail accounts that might be needed in this ever changing interactive environment. This list continues to grow, and you need to stay on top of it.

Every company in the world has an online reputation – whether it’s good or bad is of no relevance. It’s what you learn from yours that makes it an important part of your marketing process. Think of the internet as the modern day Focus Group, only this group isn’t being paid for their thoughts on you in a controlled environment; they’re openly discussing them with their friends and even with strangers in an anything goes format. In my next blog post, I’m going to give you some sample strategies ideas that could be put to use for your own campaign.

I love that Twitter thing (now what exactly is it again?)!

As you may have read, last month I made the Twitter plunge! I jumped in, tweeted my every move, searched for fellow interesting tweeters, and even made a couple friends and business connections. Now that I’ve done it – I feel compelled to answer the question “So what the hell is Twitter?” that I’ve been so frequently asked over this past year. Here’s my top level take-away for you…

1. Real Time Connections. You have 140 characters to tell the world what you are doing. If anyone cares, they connect with you and follow you and you have the opportunity to do the same. My take-away is it’s kind of like an Instant Message to the world. According to companies like Dell, they’ve sold millions of dollars of product simply by announcing new deals to their followers. Others aren’t as good at it.

2. Twitter Feeds the Ego. It took me all of about 4 minutes before I had my first follower. I was pumped – I was on top of the world… I was the next rock star of twitter world. When I didn’t reciprocate and follow them, they blocked me and moved on. What??? I learned very quickly that when you follow companies and certain individuals that they will instantly start following you. A sort of interactive warm and fuzzy for you that makes you want to hang on their every word (or at least not block them). I also learned that some people feel VERY important if they have thousands of people following them – so they reach out to EVERY person in the twitter universe simply to gain those reciprocal followers. Think of a bad link strategy that’s starting to evolve…

3.Curiosity Growth. I started to follow only agency and marketing happenings, but I quickly found out it’s fun to see how the “other half lives”. I find myself clinging to my holiday candy as I see that Lance Armstrong (@lancearmstrong) is working out indoors as it’s too cold in Austin today. I don’t know why – but I love it when inspirational people like him share their every move. Something tells me if he were to sign a deal with a chocolate company and tweet about it, I’d be a new consumer for that product. Just saying…

4. Search.Twitter.com. Research has been one of my primary uses… I’ve been able to see in real-time what people are saying about potential clients, products, etc. It’s the modern age focus group.

5. Some Get It. Some… I’ve enjoyed following places like @mashable, @bmorrissey, @agencyspy, etc… But there are still some that I wonder why… To name a couple @richardbranson and @adage simply let me know when they blogged or posted an article somewhere else. If I wanted that – I’d look at their blog or somewhere else… That being said, I’m about to go twitter that I posted this blog – so something about the pot calling the kettle names…

There are a lot of new things evolving out of twitter, and it’s still yet to be seen if it just becomes a facebook application, but for now – it’s been a fun experiment that I will continue to follow @mediatwo.

Peter Shankman, Internet Summit and IAB Q3 Revenue Report

Needless to say, it has been a whirlwind 7 day period in which plenty of things are going on in the interactive world. If you want to ask about my family’s personal tour of the White House we received during the G20 Summit last weekend – then we’re REALLY talking about a whirlwind week (I got to pet Barney without getting bit)! But back to interactive… Peter Shankman was in Raleigh speaking at the TIMA event – and if you have never seen him speak, or don’t follow him on Twitter – or really just don’t know anything about what he’s about – you’re missing out. He’s filled with plenty of stories – and filled with plenty of thoughts and ideas on where the social media/interactive world is going. I’d like to say he speaks with a lot of common sense, but driving 150 miles for a Hardee’s burger pretty much throws that out the window. That being said – he is in tune with modern day technology, and he is well connected and should be followed, tweeted, LinkedIn, etc…

This week was also the inaugural Internet Summit in Chapel Hill… I am happy to say, interactive finally has a major following in the Triangle! The event was sold out (estimated 700+ attendee’s) – and from what I could tell – a smashing success. Bob Young of LuLu and Red Hat fame spoke about how they’re a good company – but should be great if they can get their hands around everything new in interactive. Gian Fulgoni from comScore spoke about online lifts to the offline world. There were plenty of social media “experts” and what seemed to be even more legal folks in attendance. All-in-all – it was an impressive summit and one of the first that I’ve attended that I felt like I actually took more away from it than I paid for. Congrats to the group at CED and Tech Journal for pulling this all off.

And to cap off the week – in this horrible economy we’re in – the Q3 numbers were released by the IAB (which – shameless plug – Media Two is one of only 13 Associate Agency Members) and interactive grew by 11% to a tune of $5.9 Billion last quarter. No – it’s not the 20+ percent we’ve grown accustomed to, but I think you’ll all agree that showing some growth is still a positive. Lot’s going on at Media Two – so more to come, but I have a goal of getting a Twitter account this month. I’ve spoken about it, explained it, followed the phenom (including the latest Motrin/MommyBloggers) – and I think it’s about time I actually joined. Have a good one.