Digital Influence Mapping Project

The Lesson Beneath "PR in Silicon Valley"

The NYTimes.com ran a story over the weekend (that finally ended up in the print edition Business section) about the social nature of public relations efforts on behalf of Web 2.0 startups in Silicon Valley called "Spinning the Web - PR in Silicon Valley." They mean old school "social" as their example is a PR pro in the Valley who makes hay of who she knows and her ability to get clients mentioned by those who's who of tech.

Is this back-to-the-future? Hasn't Silicon Valley always been a club of sorts? Now that some of those influencers run popular media properties like Digg and social networks like Twitter that have the 'reach' previously reserved for older more established media properties, now that every business analyst worth her salt gets "news" via an eclectic RSS collection complete with new influencer blogs and Twitter search results (see our TheDailyInfluence.com), this evolution is now complete. I have visions of Pam Alexander and her notorious networking social events that helped her rise to mythical status.

But underneath the story of one publicist/PR person who manages a network of influencers vs. pumping out press releases, is the true story of change.

Public Relations is quickly adapting to the practice of identifying new influencers who have their own public platform and following and can do more to raise awareness and engagement with relevant companies and brands than traditional media relations. This is not new. And for as many examples of old school PR shops who rely on press releases to gain "coverage", there are 5 more sophisticated "new communications" firms who not only understand the phenomena of word of mouth marketing via new influencers and networks of interest groups. Many, like ours, have gotten pretty sophisticated with the process of connecting with vast, new collections of third parties. 

The Silicon Valley tribes (Tech companies, VC, Web 2.0 startups, popular bloggers/twitters) is but one microcosm.

Influencer Segmentation
Turning 'working a crowd' into an effective and scaleable approach to engaging relevant third parties such that they will authentically want to share about a new product, an intriguing service or just cause is about seeing the millions of affinity "groups" online, gauging inlfuence amongst their "members" and then taking the care to provide them a true exchange of value.

For a recent automotive project, we purposely went beyond the car bloggers and even the social media echo-chamber (top bloggers in social media) to identify 6 additional segments. Each is relevant to the brand from parent bloggers (don't forget the dads in your mad-dash to court the mom bloggers!), to design geeks to eco-dabblers (regular folks who care about being 'green' and are willing to make some decisions to be more so).

For a financial services project, we have identified 16 interest groups - things that draw people together online - passions. Within each are different influencers defined by data and qualitative analysis. While Silicon Valley relies on influencers within the tech and social media circles we all know; the rest of the broad universe has its own influencers who you might not instantly recognize.

The article captures the relationship-driven nature of Silicon Valley public relations now dominated by new media properties and individuals. What it's really pointing out is the explosion of new influencers that we identify, build relationships and rely on to reach relevant people on behalf of companies and brands. The Silicon Valley tribes are but one small slice. 

Building Personal Brands Starts With Being 'Real'

I was in a bad mood last week. I get tired of the over-promotion of social media (e.g. "you must engage in a conversation with your customers and I'm just the guru to help you with that...) as much as the attempt to "leverage" social media from segments of the marketing community (e.g. "can't we just use it as a content channel...") I had also been away from my family for a bit so that might have had something to do with it....

Then I got a much needed reminder from a man I had only known digitally.

Stream Breakfast NYC

Jeff Pulver and I came together to host a Stream Breakfast in NYC via WPP. (Stream is WPP's digital conference and community that culminates in a Yossi Vardi-fueled unconference every Fall). We spoke with about 25 or so marketers within WPP about personal branding. I referred to some of the ways people much craftier than I are managing their digital brand via Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, their blogs and more. I referenced our own Rohit Bhargava who appears to be intuitive in his ability to breath social media and build his brand (he actually works hard at it). All very practical stuff.

But it was Jeff who reminded me and the others about being real and offering something of yourself to others. He shared some very personal stories quite casually about growing up to use ham radios and his immediate experience with volunteers showing up via a tweet to help with the grunt work of 140conf. His suggestion to the crowd that morning was to be 'real' in whcih I think he meant both be yourself and be generous. There is no reason to build a brand based upon a false sense of who you are.

He listened as much as he spoke. And he offered me a personal insight about being self aware that really made me think. I immediately felt relief. Being real and connecting via social media has opened up my life in ways I cannot describe. I have met people in all parts of the world who I will always think about and hope to connect with again and again.

Jeff gave me a literal and figurative 'hug' when I most needed it.       

Thanks.

Marcelo Tas on Brazilian "Gambiarra"

Apparently, Brazilians are adept at hacking technology to make something out of very little. I am not talking about software hacks per se. I am talking about not settling for what's in front of them and assembling solutions from the bits and pieces of available elements. Think Frankenstein meets the iPod.

It's such a common thing they have a name for it: Gambiarra or as Renata Saraiva from Ogilvy points out, "Fazer uma gambiarra."

Here's how media maven Marcelo Tas describes it during my interview with him:

photo from: http://jabacominformatica.com

Marcelo Tas: Brazil's #1 Social Media Enthusiast

 

He's a TV celebrity, internet pioneer, father of 3, overall good-guy and has more than 75K followers on Twitter. Marcelo Tas has been engaged with the Internet and television for well over a decade (I love meeting guys who have been around as long as I have). I had a great dinner with him in Sao Paulo last week.

He shared a bit about himself, his social media life and his insights in Brazilian social media - all while standing outside our restaurant on the street.

 He has a hugely popular live TV show in Brazil. He will go live from April through December which makes me tired just thinking about it. Online he has his blog and his very popular Twitter feed. He is a brand and a very appealing one from where I sit. Essentially I see Marcelo as a creative entrepeneur. That means he has a natural curiosity that drives him to constantly try things and invent things, mostly media. He told me of his online shows via UOL where he challenged experts to unpack complex topics like university economist who had to explain the global economic meltdown to a taxi driver. So smart.

He regularly speaks to large brands about his experience and insights into digital culture. Here's an excerpt from my interview with him outside our restaurant in Sao Paulo. One thing is clear, Marcelo comes alive in a new way when you turn on the camera. I love his energy.

Marcelo Tas' Blog

Marcelo's Twitter Feed

His show

5% of Americans Use Twitter

Th elatest Harris Interactive Poll as reported via Media Post has a few interesting stats clouded in a few oddly misleading negative statements like  "..51% of Americans do not use Twitter or have a MySpace or Facebook account." That means that those platforms have penetrated 49% of the US in some combination or other. That is about as hockey stick-growth as you get.

Again framed as a somewhat diminutive stat in the article, this one is huge: "While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it."

5% of Americans are using Twitter! And those are more highly educated and potentially more influenntial in a general sense if for no other reason than traditional media's embrace of Twitter....

The Skinny:

Online Social Network Usage - By Age & Gender (All Online Adults; % of Age Group)
		Age Group				Gender
Network Usage	Total	18-34	35-44	45-54	55+	Male	Female
Have a Facebook or MySpace account	48%	74	47	41	24	45	52
Update Facebook or MySpace account at least once a day	16	29	17	10	3	14	18
Use Twitter (Net)	5	8	7	4	1	5	5
Follow people on Twitter	5	8	6	4	1	5	5
Use Twitter to send messages	3	4	5	1	*	3	2
None of these	51	25	50	59	76	54	47'
Source: Harris Interactive, April 2009  Multiple responses allowed; * indicates less than 0.5%

Online Social Network Usage - By Education (All Online Adults; % of Group)
		Education
Network Usage	Total	HS or less	Some College	College Grad+
Have a Facebook or MySpace account	48%	40	55	52
Update Facebook or MySpace account at least once a day	16	14	18	16
Use Twitter (Net)	5	3	7	6
Follow people on Twitter	5	3	6	6
Use Twitter to send messages	3	1	4	4
None of these	51	59	43	47
Source: Harris Interactive, April 2009  Multiple responses allowed; * indicates less than 0.5%

For additional information from Harris Interactive, please visit here.

3 Trends in Integrating Social Media

Brands are doing three important things to get ready for this change:  

• Demanding that their agencies - big and small - step in to train their internal marcom teams on thinking through the application of social media. Look at the number of "digital days" held at brands. We did an important one at Unilever in December on social media-based word of mouth marketing. P&G did their Digital Day, J&J had their Babycamp. We have at least 2 more coming up for various brands.

• Hiring evangelists from the early adopters or growing them from within. Ford has Scott Monty. Pepsi has Bonin Baugh. Dell has Liana Frey. Kraft has Andy Markowitz. These experts go through a useful and predicatble transormation. They start as "the social media guy/gal" that everyone tries to get in their meetings. Slowly but surely, they turn to training internally out of the need to scale their expertise across the organization (either that or they do it out of sheer self-preservation. Once you create the social media hunger inside an organization, the only way to feed it is clone yourself.

• Training internal marcom staff across disciplines in social media marketing integration. We are not talking about "social media 101", here. Brands see the discipline-busting effect of social media. They are training advertising-driven brand managers in public relations and social media marketing. Likewise, they are training the communications staff to apply the value of paid media to an overall program. This is the most emergent of trends and I expect it to grow ten fold this year. Brands need a new breed of marcom expert. The marketing and PR schools (including where I teach at Johns Hopkins) are just starting to train across disciplines and train in social media. It's up to brands to invest more in training than perhaps they did a few years ago. The good news is that training a great marketer in planning and using social media is easier than training a social media pundit to be a great marketer.

More changes on the way.....

Mombloggers Evolve Again

 We have always done a lot of work with mom bloggers. Four years ago we tried to drag a major consumer brand into this space with a huge mom blogging initiative and learned a humbling experience about how different companies need to gradually get into the social media space (our approach was tantamount to jumping into the unkown depths of the rock quarry pool vs. just sticking a toe in). We got smarter fast and partnered with BlogHer and many other orgs and individuals since them.  

It's all to engage these new influencers in a way that they authentically 'care to share.' That means always figuting out what the Engagement Value is (see excerpt from the New Strategic Brief).

 

Now, I realize that everyone is saying that they work with moms who blog on behalf of brands. And so do mom bloggers. Many, like Wal-Mart's 11 Moms, are aligning themselves with brands serving as a type of 'kitchen cabinet' of new-influencers-with-a-platform. In that role they provide useful intelligence inbound to the brand and serve as a core group for outbound word of mouth (WOM). Brands empower them to give away product, prizes and coupons (I am going to stick by my assertion that we at Ogilvy's 360 Digital Influence team, pioneered this type of engagement via our "microcontest" model which empowers bloggers to reward readers and commenters with product and prizes, I will acknowledge that many are now following suit). We are evolving from a model of campaign-based blogger outreach to blogger alignment. This is the social media approach to sponsored spokesperson but with a couple of big differences.

Mom bloggers own their voice. They must retain credibility with their highly personal audiences and never shill. The level of disclosure and transparency must remain super-high. I love that the 11Moms for example only mention Wal-Mart in approximately 6% of their posts over the last 30 days and frequently mention other retailers. That's their call. With the aggregate reach they have accumulated, that 6% of brand mentions, the badges on their blogs, and the aggregate content on walmart.com - it all adds up as a great value.

And mom bloggers are ready to embrace a brand experience with the expectation that they will talk about it and engage their readers in some way. They retain the right to share honestly, so, beware the poor product experience - they will talk about that too. CityMama has a great post offering her advice to other bloggers about successfully aligning their desire to blog with what marketers want. I love her last point:

"And lastly, on a personal note: to thine own self be true. If any of the above doesn't feel right, don't do it. If you have hesitations about accepting or reviewing a product because it either doesn't fit your lifestyle or your values or you don't think your readers would trust your glowingly positive review of it, decline it. If you are a slow food blogger who suddenly starts extolling the virtues of fast food and high-fructose corn syrup, your readers are going to know something is up and you'll feel like an asshole. For every product you decline to review, no matter how tempting it is, something better will come along, I promise. Something that makes sense, something you can feel good about, and something that that marketer will feel good about sending to you because they know you've worked hard to build that trusted following."

Momblogging 2.0

Lindsay Ferrier of Suburban Turmoil wrote a great post about the new evolving role. (Note: I know this because of a terrific resource - WOMMA's Word of Mouth Blog that pumps out the "Daily 5" great links on social media and WOM).

Mom bloggers (and I would argue Fashion, Food, and Lifestyle bloggers) understand the value they provide and the willingness for brands to offer them product experiences from cars to coupons. They are now marketing themselves as valuable outlets.

"One woman was in talks with a car manufacturer to get a free car for one year. Several of the moms there had been flown to Blissdom by a corporate sponsor who was sending them to every major blog conference in the country. And don’t think these opportunities were just handed to them.

“My husband puts my business cards on random shelves at the grocery,” one mom confided.

“I put my business cards in magazines at the doctor’s office and the bookstore,” another mom said."

The Next Evolution

Many consumer brands who want to sell to moms will evolve to establishing long term relationships with a brand ambassador core. Mom bloggers will self-identify as a Kraft, J&J, Quaker, Ford, Unilever mom blogger. The quality of the interaction they have with the brand will be a big factor as to how positive this relationship will be. If brands really listen to them as much as they try to activate their "WOM", so-to-speak, it will be more successful to all. We will move beyond simple "product review" sites (many bloggers maintain secondary review sites as a way to protect their main editorial).

The next evolution will be about scale. Once you have established and are maintaining meaningful relationships with 20 or 30 mombloggers, how do you expand the reach of that effort without diminishing those relationships. We have an answer in our concentric ring model and I expect others are working on their own solutions. Strange, but as this evolves it starts to look an awful lot like what we proposed 4 years ago. But that happens sometimes.

Social Media Books: A Strong Guide for Today's Communicators

I read a lot. Who doesn't these days. I read pretty much every book on social media out there (I read many other things as well - Design, Branding, Strategy, Business Innvovation, Fiction, Comic Books (re-reading Watchmen now). I periodically update my Amazon Reading List. I teach graduate school and routinely pick out the most useful books for class.

Anyhow, many of the social media books are not useful. Perhaps they are written quickly with little research or insight in order to get their authors into the speaking circuit and hopefully to more lucrative consulting careers. (If you are a great speaker with a great topic I am guessing that doing 30 speeches a year at $10K is a bit rough, and much harder to do today).

I read Tactical Transparency over the holiday break by Shel Holtz and John C. Havens. I was expecting another unoriginal speech-justifier (not due to any reputation issues, just a fatalist attitude I had at the time). What I got was a great synopsis of the significance and opportunities of social media for "business communicators" or corporate communications PR specialists.

I am not sure if there are new insights in the book beyond the umbrella proposition that "transparency" is a "critical business issue." This is certainly ground many, including Shel, have been talking about for years. But nowhere has anyone pulled the argument together so clearly and comprehensively as Tactical Transparency (here's their book site). Where Groundswell summarized again the phenomena that is social media marketing and became the replacement "textbook" for those who wanted to catch up quickly, Tactical Transparency does the same for corporate PR.

The Opportunity with Internal Communications

One of the richest parts of the book is their thinking and coverage of social media's impact and opportunity for employee relations and communications. Each of us works inside businesses comprised of a potential army of brand ambassadors or a silent population, or worse, grumbling legion of detractors. Too little attention is given to the potential of social media to unlock the potential of employees. I suspect that may be due in part to the lingering leadership of "traditional" communications experts in and around the C-suite who see employee communications as the least they can do to "control" messages.

The "One Book" for Business Communicators

Tactical Transparency is a great, catch-up guide to how social media impacts communications. If there was only one book you could read to learn (as you also apply social media to your life, of course), this is it. It is also perfect for the current generation of corporate comms PR person. As for the PR Professional of the Future you can see the ingredients I feel they will need going forward here. You can also get introduced to their boss, The Chief Marcom Customer Service Officer here.     

11Moms (or 21 ) Matter More for Walmart

Walmart shares some abstract similarities with Dell in relation to their experience with social media. The particulars are different but I would argue that the road they have traveled has been from negative to positive, from un-engaged, to engaged, and from displaying littel interest in their customers' POV to an authentic interest. Remember I said "displaying" that interest. I am sure both organizations would argue they have been customer-centric forever. Social media requires a more open display of that to succeed.

Jeremiah Owyang at Forrester posted on his visit with the Walmart social media gang and all they are doing.This includes their "11Moms" group blog/magazine-like platform .They are not paid only offered "soft incentives" which is probably like travel expenses for meetings and product promotions and the like - nothing that would pay off that mortgage or anything. 

Ultimately, it is one of the "11moms" comment to his post that really reveals the strength of what they are doing. Lucretia Pruitt - Geek Mommy posted her comment (un-filtered by Walmart which may sound trivial to those of us who spend a lot of time in social media but is, itself, a strong indicator of who deeply they are committed to getting it right. Here's what she said:

"Chad & Rob - there are ’soft’ incentives as Jeremiah pointed out - but the main reason that the program has succeeded in retaining our interest and involvement is Walmart itself and the people who work there and believe in it.

The day after Josh visited Walmart’s HQ in Bentonville, we were there as well. Thanks to the efforts of John Andrews and his team, we met with an amazing assortment of people all the way up to sitting in a room talking with Eduardo Castro-Wright and other executives discussing how Walmart can engage its customers - in particular, Moms - in a genuine and authentic way.

The day after that, we were privileged to attend the famous “Saturday Morning Meeting” and to meet Lee Scott - who even escorted us out to our departure shuttle and talked with us as well.

The people at Walmart are what make the difference and why we stay engaged. They’re families and real, working, concerned, invested folks just like we are and they believe in the changes Walmart is making. You can’t fake that.

Lots of bloggers get “soft” incentives from companies - but the passion we have to see Walmart succeed in this Social Media space comes from our own belief that they earnestly care about what their customers think. If they didn’t? No amount of goods could sway us.
Because honestly? Jeremiah’s ’skepticism’ is commonly expressed to us as down-right shock that we would work with them. Until someone talks to us for awhile and then understanding happens.

We, the ElevenMoms, believe in what Walmart is trying to do. That’s what makes it work"

This is similar to the type of brand engagement with new influencers that we have done with LG, TJMaxx, Louis Vuitton and others. Inviting new influencers in to spend time with the brand and serve as a type of "kitchen cabinet." It is a great way to change your organization as well into one that truly has empathy for customers and influencers.

Those brands that remain in social media - trying new things, changing their own organization to be successful - will be those that reap the benefit of a more effective marketing - authentic word of mouth. I admire both Walmart and Dell for enduring beyond their original hotwater and becoming leaders in thi space. I just wish the 11 moms experience wasn't so embedded in their web site template. It may just be a design issue for me or it might be the belief that 11 moms might work even harder as its own url with its own Web 2.0 simplicity. But that is a minor complaint towards all that they are doing right with it.

The PR Professional of the Future: 2009 Edition

The Public Relations profession has been facing transformation well before the introduction of  social media. As traditional media splintered at the magazine stands, through hundreds of TV channels, and yes, the arrival of the “interwebs,” the role of the communications expert has gotten more complex and less connected to the C-suite.

If I were a CEO, I would want people who understood these changes at my side. I would want to know how communications works today and how it is likely to work tomorrow. I would want folks who could deploy programs quickly and remain nimble in their response to the marketplace.

We have been building a vision for what the skills and expertise of the PR pro of the future must be. At PR Week’s excellent Next Conference, we debuted a video that captures the thinking from some of the current leaders in communications. There are some excellent POVs here about the fundamental attitudes and expertise. Still, these are missing some new skills that will become essential for PR to play that trusted advisor role going into the future.

For an alternate view, check out this growing list of actual skills and expertise: The 13 Skills of the Public Relations Professional of the Future