Robert Beadle's Social Media Marketing Blog

Last Thursday evening, I had the pleasure of hosting Steve Quigley, APR, for our PRSA “Social Media for Beginners” event.  I very much enjoyed his presentation style because even though he is a Boston University associate professor and has long list of professional accomplishments, he portrayed himself as an average guy who is still catching up with this stuff (social media).  He got the audience laughing throughout the evening and I think people felt a little less bewildered because they could see Steve was just like us.

While I could write a very long post about his ideas and insights, I will share those that had the greatest impact on me:

Social media technologies really make us think about our traditional approaches to public relations.  In grad school, I was taught that good PR was a two-way street in which the company both distributed messages and opened up channels to receive messages from the public.  However, when I got out into the business world, I realized that companies rarely opened up listening channels and often used PR as a way to dictate their messages to the world without really listening.

Social media now removes all the excuses companies once had for taking this one-way approach.  Now businesses have an easy way to open up their ears and finally listen.  However, it’s difficult for many older generations who have grown so accustomed to the “dictation” approach to PR and marketing that they need to shift their whole concept of business communication in order to successfully adopt these new technologies.

But it’s not just the technology that is changing.  It’s also the way we speak.  In the old days, businesses could get away with “corporate speak” in which language was impersonal, sterile, full of jargon.  But now, consumers want to hear the voices “behind the curtain” and feel like the captains of business are really listening and talking with their public rather than hiding behind a faceless corporate entity.

So I want to say thanks to Steve Quigley for his outstanding presentation to my PRSA group and if you get the chance to hear him speak up in the Boston area, I highly encourage you to join him.

One question I get asked a lot at my PR and social media seminars is, “It’s such a hassle to update my ‘status’ on three different sites.. isn’t there an easier way to do?

Yes there is! It’s called http://ping.fm/. Once you establish a free account, you can give it permission to access your multiple social networking sites and when it’s time to update your status, you just login to your ping.fm account and it synchronizes all your profiles for you.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

I was passing through Times Square in New York City last weekend when I stopped to just marvel at it. Every flat surface, and even some curved ones, were covered with giant billboards.

The very first time I was in Times Square, 20 years ago, it was plastered with static billboards, but today the place more closely resembles Las Vegas with its LED and animated displays. It seems everywhere you turn someone or some company is trying to compete for your attention. The result? Message overload.

Time Square represents what advertising has become, a virtual arms race to come up with a bigger and better campaign to draw your attention. But what do we really do? We train ourselves to block it out.

In 2007, Jakob Nielsen, Ph.D., did a study on the phenomenon of Internet “banner blindness” and found that most banner ads on the Web go completely unnoticed. For years we’ve had popup blockers software and tools because their use got out of control and prevented us from seeing the content we were there to view. We put spam filters on our e-mail. We have Tivo and DVR recording devices to skip past commercials. As consumers we waging our own battle against the growing onslaught of advertising messages.

The problem with advertising is that it often assumes exposure translates into consumer purchases. In reality, advertising may play a role in raising awareness of a brand, if you advertise enough in the right places, but it doesn’t actually sell anything. Today’s consumers are intelligent and make their purchasing choices based on research and word of mouth.

Al and Laura Ries wrote a famous book in PR circles called “The Fall of Advertising and The Rise of PR” to explain the decline of advertising credibility and the rising influence of the third party (journalists, friends, family, colleagues). Pick it up for a good read.

Presenting to a group of skeptics isn’t the easiest thing in the world.

A challenge I face in most of my seminars is to take some very complex and highly technical concepts and create a clear picture in the minds of my audience to help them see ahead to the exciting new public relations possibilities which lay before them.  And it is my goal to make sure each person can walk away with a tool, or set of tools, they can put into place the next day.

Complicating things further is that most of my audiences are made up of a mixed group.  Some are very tech-savvy, and in some niches, better equipped than I.  But there are others in the audience who don’t even have an e-mail address yet.  (Yes, I know…)  This is not entirely bad thing, because it forces me to put my presentations into plain, everyday English and usually in the end, even the techies come to appreciate that.

With one particular tech-challenged audience, I knew conveying the big picture was my best chance at inspiring them to action.

“Do you remember the very first time you heard about the Internet?” I began.

I recalled my first time, in 1994 when I heard about the Internet, then called the “Super Information Highway,” on the TV news.  People said it would be big.

An acquaintance of mine who worked at the New York Times during the early to mid 90s, said that the Web site news department was so cramped, that they referred to their carpet-less, antiquated office as “the rat hole.”  Even the New York Times didn’t think this whole digital thing would take off.

Now 15 years later, it’s hard to imagine a world without the Internet.  It serves as a foundation of modern day business.  It’s a pillar of our social lives.  We bank, shop, share ideas, connect with other like minded people and even find love on the Internet.  Remove it and there would be an economic collapse of massive proportions.

“Remember when Google came out?” I continued.

In the late 90s, Google was one of those new “Web crawlers” out to rival Yahoo, Megellan, Lycos and Excite.  Back then, if you told me someone was “Googling” me, I would’ve probably filed a restraining order.  But now as ridiculous as the name once sounded, it is a term that’s synonymous with the word “search.”  It’s currently the most powerful tool for organizing the massive information heap that is the Internet.  These days, if you’re not on Google, you don’t exist.

And now it’s 2009 and I’m telling you about this crazy phenomenon known as “new media PR and marketing.”  Call it “social media marketing” call it “Web 2.0.”  Just like the super information highway, those terms may die off, but what’s more important is the concept.  And just like the Google and the Internet itself, it’s here to stay.

Whereas the Internet used to be a place to house what I call “Web brochures” or old Web sites that were simply about promoting their companies’ products and services as a one way dialogue, today the Internet (Web 2.0) is about conversations and two way dialogue.  Social media is simply a collection of software tools that allow groups to generate content, to share it and engage in peer-to-peer conversations.

However, there’s one big difference.  Social media is growing at a rate much faster than that of its platform.  So while the Internet took about 10 years to evolve passed its initial phase, social media is well into its adolescence and moving into adulthood.

Getting into social media now is like arriving at a party that’s been going on for five years.  And there’s a pretty good chance that your competitors are already there too, mingling with your prospects, forming relationships, winning friends.

But congratulate yourself.  You’ve read this far because at some point, you realized you need to know about this stuff.  I’m here to filter out the good information from the bad, the useful from the useless and present it here for you.  And if you see something you love, something with which you disagree or just want to share, talk to me and let me know about it.

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