Martin: Recently I’ve been reading that YouTube may start paying video producers for their work sometime in 2007.  More than likely the site will run lead-in ads at the front of the more popular videos and share the ad revenue with the video producers. Some stories I’ve read say this opens the door for business to use YouTube.

As Bob noted in a recent post, marketing using audio and video is powerful. Some marketing folks see that and are already using YouTube to show product features.  But here’s what can happen. Both BMW and Lexus have videos up showing automated parking, which would seem like a cool feature. Each video shows how easy it is to parallel park each car.  Now on the other hand, YouTube also increases the risk of consumers looking into any glossed over issues and allows someone to point out these in a public forum.

Take Automobile Magazine’s test parking of the Lexus. Its result was very different. The three guys in the car couldn’t have been more frustrated with each other or the Lexus’ inability to park perpendicular. Almost like an Abbott and Costello routine, the video shows repeated attempts and the car still isn’t parked. (Buy the way, the video opens showing how quickly the testers parked the car manually.)

See for yourself the problems they ran into. Watching the Lexus made video and the product test aren’t endorsement for automated parking. Here’s the rub -- YouTube may evolve into a powerful medium for companies to positively present products, but any unhappy customer with a video camera can post the antithesis. So be ready for prime time when you go there. Stay honest.  And prepare to respond. (I didn't find a response to this test by Lexus.)

Bob: One of the most powerful new social media marketing tools are short audio or video clips. A business associate in the mobile communications industry recently sent me a link that was a real eye-opener, underscoring the power of video and end-users. http://www.mobilitysite.com/2007/01/video_1st_look_imate_jaq3_pocket_pc_phon.php

The 18-minute video on YouTube  is an un-boxing of i-mate's new JAQ3 Pocket PC  Phone by an online blogger/product reviewer.  Though the lighting was poor and the audio marginal, I sat transfixed at the implications of what I was seeing. This guy literally showed the box, turned it around, unpackaged the contents, and proceeded to walk the viewer through all the contents of the box, making comments (good and bad) about what he found. Towards the end of the video, he popped in the battery and fired up the phone showing off some of the features as well.

To tell you the truth, I don't remember all of the good and bad comments, but this guy's opinion was informed, straight up, and honest.  This was business reality video. This was a reality case study. This was digital storytelling. This was credible, believeable marketing. This was so simple, it was powerful.

See any applications for this kind of approach with your products and services? 

Martin:  For the past year or so, I’ve been seeing advertisements by companies wanting to hire writers to blog for them. Many show they don’t value the writer by offering writers $10 for a 300-400 word blog, or to write for them because the writer will get great visibility and experience. But some are more serious and understand that it’s not just about hiring someone just to fill blogspace with blather but really about hiring a writer with copywriting or journalism experience who can contribute meaningful ideas and content.

Both approaches raise the question—is it fair for companies to even buy writers to do this? I’ve ghosted hundreds of articles for companies and individuals with no qualms. So what is it that makes me queasy about companies hiring writers to blog?

My knee jerk response is no, that’s counter to the blogger’s code. Then after some reflection, my answer is why not? Companies hire writers to do their annual reports, marketing collateral, ad copy, their Website and a blog is just another extension of a company’s communication.

The crux of the issue is that like ghostwriting, the writer has not only to know your audience and your subject matter, but also the person and the company you’re writing for. It takes effort to bring all these together. Someone writing for a blog for a dime (or less) a word can’t do that. Their interest is more on quantity—and in amounts even prodigious Isaac Asimov was capable of—if they are going to make even a fair living.

And that’s at the heart of my issue. Companies don’t often trade off quantity for quality in their communications. It’s too important to their image. They spend a lot of time and effort to get their messages right. And they want them integrated well into their external communications. So they don’t want to hire someone who’s just blogging for bucks.

Fair disclosure also applies here. While it’s easy to not disclose ghostwriting for print, it’s not appropriate to for blogging. If a blogger is really ghosting for an executive, then say that the blog is by both the executive and the writer. That’s what they do in the book world when you see and expert’s or celebrity’s name on the book cover followed by “and” someone else. But for this level of visibility, the writer needs to significantly contribute to the effort and not just transcribe the executive’s notes.

So my opinion is that it’s fine to hire writer to write for a corporate blog. But hire one who can knit together the company, the subject, appeal to the company’s audience and add significant ideas at the same time.

Bob: Recently OPEN American Express did a survey among 625 small business owners asking which business skills they would like to develop further. Not surprising, the two top responses were customer service and marketing/sales.

Social Media Marketing tools can help you do both, better.

Social Media by definition is about getting closer to your customer and prospects. A variety of new social media marketing tools allow you to know about, listen to, and respond to web-based conversations that are going on about your company and products.   It follows, then, if you know customers and prospects better, you can service them better.

As for marketing and sales, social media marketing tools are a boon as well. They help build awareness and preference about your products and services, a precursor to making any sale.  These new tools help you communicate more directly to prospects and customers, who, in some cases, are nearly impossible to reach with traditional marketing activities.

Though the OPEN American Express survey was aimed at small businesses, companies of any size realize that better customer service and marketing can always be improved.

The PR business buzz for 2006 seemed to be around the social media release. But my guess is that the “Betamax versus VHS” competition that’s emerging will cause confusion and slow the acceptance of this approach down in 2007 as the various formats fight it out.

What’s really new about the change in the press release is its shift over the past couple of years from being a narrowly focused media tool to becoming a broad based tool for getting company information out. In fact, the research firm Outsell LLC issued a report saying that knowledge workers look to press release over trade publications as their top news source.

There’s another press release trend to watch. Let’s call it the “incentive press release.” It’s standard practice to put the URL of a company in the press release. But it’s there primarily for reference. Because press releases are viewed more and more as news sources by everyone on the Web, there’s an opportunity to use the advertising technique of a call to action in them along with an "incentive." A new product release could include and incentive such as a link to a data sheet or white paper along with the release. The company could set up a landing page and drive readers to that page. If they did, they would know how many downloads they got and could have a better idea of the impact of their press release.

The same approach could be used with white papers and case studies and other marketing materials that are normally buried deep in a company’s Website. Companies can create a release based upon the content of these documents and then drive readers to a specific landing page for them.

In addition, these releases continue to be accessible to searcher after the big PR push is over.

Tags: press release, PR, social media release, marketing, smart marketing, incentive

What do Gartner’s 2007 predictions mean for social media? Two of the their key predictions for 2007 seemingly provide conflicting directions for social media.

Gartner prediction #3: Blogging and community contributors will peak in the first half of 2007. Given the trend in the average life span of a blogger and the current growth rate of blogs, there are already more than 200 million ex-bloggers. Consequently, the peak number of bloggers will be around 100 million at some point in the first half of 2007.

Does this mean blogging is dying and no longer effective? Other than maybe being concerned about what ex-bloggers will now do with their spare time, we don’t think so. This is just digital Darwinism at work. Like the hula-hoop craze, blogging was an e-craze. People jumped in and tried it. They had fun and found ways to use technology they'd not thought about before. Then reality set in. They found that unless you have already established a routine of writing regularly, keeping up a blog can be brutal work and takes time away from the rest of your life.

The bigger impact with be on blogging services. Like any other market, this one will consolidate. There will be three to four services serving 80 percent of the market and the remaining services fighting for the remaining 20 percent. Also, the remaining bloggers will be those with truly something different to say and who understand how to use blogs.

Gartner prediction #4: By 2009, corporate social responsibility (CSR) will be a higher board- and executive-level priority than regulatory compliance. Regulation has become a key issue for government and the corporate world, with the aim of ensuring more-responsible behavior. However, the need for companies to be socially responsible to their employees, customers and shareholders is growing as well. The future will see corporate boards and executives make this social dynamic a more-critical priority.

Maybe we can thank the assault on Wal-Mart for this one. Increased social consciousness for corporations means a greater need for social media and the trying out of new tools and approaches to communicate both internally and externally. This could make social media marketing surge in the next couple of years as companies sort out how to communicate their new found social conscience.

Bob: Long a staple of small and medium business marketers, the e-newsletter may be on its death bed according to the small business consultant Warrillow .

What's killing off the once favored e-newsletter? RSS. Real Simple Syndication. It's part of the new social media marketing tools you now have at your disposal. RSS works both as an outgoing and incoming content tool. For example, you can tap the power of RSS by becoming a content programmer. If your customer is interested in a product or topic of yours, he can sign up for the content about that topic and have it sent to a feed aggregator like Bloglines. Services like Bloglines collect the requested feeds in one place to be read when convenient. Every time the content is updated it's sent to Bloglines and is ready and waiting when the subscriber wants. No searching required. RSS is a huge time savings for busy business people.

RSS also works if you or your company is seeking information. It allows the consolidation of important information from other companies presenting it in a quickly assimilated format.

Bob: Time Magazine just announced its person of the year…it’s you…and all the rest of us. We’re transforming the information age through the use of new Web technology and social media like blogs, chat rooms, websites, and host of text, audio and video share spaces. To emphasize the point, the news magazine attached a Mylar mirror to nearly seven million copies of the December 16th edition. Look who’s making waves!

In an article entitled, “Person of the Year: You”, Time’s editor Lev Grossman, points out that the revolution taking place with the Web is a story about community and collaboration on a scale that’s completely new. Trends he claims will not only change the world, but change how things actually change.

So, what’s the implication to your business? Probably more than any of us realize right now. But this much is pretty sure. People are connecting with people in unprecedented and unexpected ways using the Web, thus the moniker: social media. These same people are your customers and prospects. Knowing what they’re saying and engaging in a conversation with them is a journey that none of us should ever miss.

Bob: According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project in a USA Today article on the impact of new technology, it is continuing to shift our "social, political and economic lives," notes Lee Rainie, Pew's project director. Rainie continued to zero in on social media and the growing changes people are experiencing: "The way they maintain and grow their social networks, and the way they share their stories with others through blogs (and) social networks."

Several years ago a prior company I owned pioneered the concept of digital storytelling as an extension of a core high tech PR business. The idea was that, fundamentally, we're all storytellers and businesses have great success stories to share...financial stories, sales stories, technology stories, marketing stories, people stories, customer stories. Basically, our company leveraged streaming video and the Internet. The only problem was we were 10 years ahead of our time. The streaming video technology was expensive and hard to use. I remember dropping $3,000 for a digital video camera and sound gear. Borrowing expensive editing software because we were too cheap to spend another $1,500 (besides, we had to borrow the talent to run the editing software because is was so complicated). In additon, most users only had dial-up. As I recall, we spent over a year and $250,000 chasing the digital storytelling business dream. We bombed of course, but it wasn't for lack of stories or storytellers. The technology bit us in the end so to speak.

Now, all the pieces are in place to embrace digital storytelling in a big way within Social Media. Digital cameras and phones, high speed pipes, and great distribution channels like media enabled news distributors, blogs and streaming broadcast sites. These are excellent examples of the new Social Media Marketing tools you now have at your digital fingertips.

Martin: The reliability and openness of Wikipedia has been questioned over the past several months. The idea the masses are smarter than mere individuals has some credibility. The corollary is also true.

Sure Wikipedia has errors. Errors are human. They can sneak in when trying to explain complex topic. They can creep in when trying to evaluate someone’s biography. Sometimes these are just honest differences of opinion. Other times they may reflect some bias of the writer.

To control swinging changes, Wikipedia is no longer as open as it once was. Some call this approach elitist and against the original openness of the idea. But when you play in a virtual sandbox where some people have more time and shout louder, they take over the sandbox. As a result, other people get pragmatic and look for solutions to remedy this. This might make Wikipedia more like the Encyclopedia Britannica its been compared with, but it doesn’t quash it as a resource. Neither is perfect.

Depending on your view, we have the fortune or misfortune, to like in an era when communication is rapidly changing. As new technologies for communicating emerge, so to new ways of communicating. The telegraph gave us the inverted pyramid style of newspaper reporting. Television, the sound byte. But these ways to communicate both took time to evolve. Now the focus seems more about the rapidity of communication and less about content.

What’s this brouhaha mean for social media marketing? It seems just this. Move ahead. Try something. Expect to make mistakes. Adjust. Try again. And at each step pay attention to your content. It’s still king.

Bob: Why should you care about what’s going on in social media area? Because your customers and industry pundits are having a conversation about you whether you’re involved or not.  Sun-Tzu, a Chinese general & military strategist (~400 BC), once said: "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.”

Regardless of what people (employees, stockholders, stakeholders, customers, partners, editors, analysts, bloggers, etc.) are saying about your company—especially if it’s negative—you need to know.

You’re either part of the conversation or not. If you’re not, then you’re missing an opportunity to influence the marketplace. The social media revolution means many more people have a voice. It’s like the whole theater audience can now influence the outcome of the play.

Many more people can now influence the success of your company. A great example of engaging a new audience is Microsoft’s Mobius community (full disclosure: my company created the website). Here mobile communications pundits (writers, bloggers, analysts, OEM leaders) can come to a private, invitation-only blog that’s directly connected to a lead product manager at Microsoft, John Starkweather.

The few hundred members have a horse’s-mouth dialog with an expert who openly listens to the rants and raves of these key shakers and movers. But the sphere of influence doesn’t stop there. These influentials are writing, talking, and listening to their own audiences as well. Bottom-line, because one heads-up product manager at Microsoft understands the importance of getting in on the conversation, a whole market segment is impacted.

Is it all worth it? As the teaser website explains: The collective insights, opinions and influence of Mobius drives market trends, industry buzz and the buying behavior of people worldwide.

Mr. Starkweather gets a star!

Bob:  As you know, Taco Bell is dealing with a major E coli outbreak in some of its restaurants. Dozens of people are affected and the potential financial “hit” is not insignificant. Most of us cringe a little bit when we read these stories as it’s very easy to imagine an equivalent crisis hitting our own companies. However, I’m wondering if Taco Bell could have saved themselves a cool $100,000—the cost of one open letter ad in USA Today this morning by being more proactive with the social media than just the traditional media?

Historically, large corporations with a crisis of national scope turn to major newspapers such as the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to state their case, concern and plan of action. That’s not a bad strategy, but it’s slow relative to the instant nature of the web and quite costly.  In addition, there is no provision for comment or response. No way to judge the public pulse to this crisis. Message longevity is another factor companies give up if they choose an ad over a blog. The effectiveness of the ad expires as it’s tossed into recycle bin.

Making sure your marketing and communications programs also include tapping the power of social media marketing is vital to keeping up with the internet conversation about your company that's happening real time. Leveraging the social media channel is fast, enables feedback, creates messages with a longer shelf life, and is a heck of a lot cheaper.

Stephanie:  A quick note.  Blogs continue to evolve and gain importance.  eWeek reports that Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz suggested that his blog be used as an alternative to press conferences and press releases  for important information.  His argument is that if the goal is to get information to people rapidly and conveniently, the Internet fits the bill. The SEC agreed in principle and they are going slowly to make sure they comply. 

If you have not started blogging, you really need to get started.  Your business could depend on it.

Martin: Two different AP stories recently hinted at something important about technology,  communication and social media. Placing the two stories side by side and reading them pulls out a theme.  Some of us are communicating faster, but not necessarily better.

The first story, "Business, B-Schools Fight Bad Writing," focuses on businesses and business schools bemoaning poor writing by students. The blame? Nonstop e-mail, IMing and text messaging. The second point out the obvious gap between boomer and the younger generation. Boomers prefer e-mail younger people prefer IM.

Part of the problem, however, seems to be the illusion that faster and even multiple conversations are productive. The instantaneous of the message and the ability to respond means that we don't always handle the communication opportunity well. Who's not received or sent and email that shouldn't have been? For companies this can be a big problem, especially if they are ever involved in a legal discovery. Lawyers have a way of taking innocent mistakes and building cases on them.

At least email prevents multitasking conversations pointed out in the second story, "Teens, Adults Separated by IM Gap."  The illusion here is that we can conduct a half a dozen conversations at once without the other parties knowing. But what happens is to stay on top of six conversations we just toss statements out there  without really understanding the content or context of each conversation.

Will communication speed kill quality content?

Maybe you can tell us.

Stephanie: There's an interesting article on Businessweek.com written by Burt Helm called 'Yelping for Dollars'  The 'Yelp' refers to Yelp.com an online service started in 2004, that encourages local users to write reviews about their city's hotspots.   This includes restaurants, spas, shopping, etc.  The catch here is that to build momentum, Helm reports, they are 'hiring freelancers to play the part of enthusiastic fans.' 

I'm interested in what will happen with this approach.  I know it takes a while to get buzz going, but do reviews-for-pay foster community?  My guess is probably yes, because the reviewers are not pressured to write a favorable review, just a well-written one.  Yelp believes the quality of the writing is what will set it apart, so handpicking their writers to build critical mass can make sense.  We'll have to wait and see.