Dear PR Peeps – I’ve been on both sides of the desk. I’m a long-time blogger with a journalism degree. Somewhere along the line, I took a wrong turn and spend 10 years or so in PR before turning my attention to Internet strategy in 1995. So I’ve pitched and been pitched. And lemme tell you, the way the vast majority of PR people pitch is astoundingly lazy and lacking in basic people skills. That’s why I’m happy to share a great pitch with you.

But first, a study in contrasts with a recent PR Pitch from Hell: “B.L., I understand you cover topics related to social media.” + unsolicited press release. oh puh-lese. That’s wrong on so many levels. Then there was the one about Samsung’s new viral, released that morning.

If you want to learn how to pitch effectively, please read this pitch from Rob Toledo of Distilled Creative. It’s one of the best I’ve ever received.

Why?
- He’s apparently visited my blog – seen my photo – and not called me “Mr. Ochman”.
- He’s not only looked at What’s Next Blog, he read my bio and thoroughly my recent post, not just read the headline.
- Then he took the trouble to go to my pet blog, Pawfun, and to tell me that he’s also a dog lover who volunteers at a shelter.
- He wrote it in a human voice, not PRese.
- He didn’t say “I know you’ll want to tell your readers about this.” Because, dear PR peeps, you do not tell me what I want to tell my readers about.

Here’s his pitch, followed, of course, by what he was pitching.It’s about social media success.

What he was pitching

Click image to open interactive version (via Simply Business).

Bonus Links:
- PR People of Earth – get a clue
- 10 Tips on how to make your video go viral
- How to make a video contest go viral
- Can viral be created? Yes, and no

Can you even remember one of this year’s Super Bowl ads? If you can’t, you’re certainly not alone.

The reason so many fossilized companies still throw that kind of money into such traditional advertising is that companies still apparently want to believe there’s a magic bullet that will create “buzz” and “go viral.”

But there is not – never was, and never will be – a magic bullet that makes a brand popular, memorable, or trustworthy.

There are so many other ways for brands to spend money to build what really matters: trust, a great reputation, and admiration.

For every watershed masterpiece like the 1984 ad that introduced the Apple McIntosh there are 300 ads featuring long-dead Fred Astaire re-mastered into a vacuum ad or GoDaddy ads (any one will do) or Holiday Inns’ “Bob Johnson” transsexual commercial or the upside down clown who poured a bottle of Bud Light in his butt, And every one of those lame ads cost millions.

All of these ads come from companies and agencies that still believe advertising helps control the message consumers get from their brands.

Times have changed. Media has changed. And the consumer has changed. The consumer is in charge now, and pouring money into flashy ads is a lot like pouring it down the drain or the clown, as the case may be.

Here are several much better ways to spend $3.5 million (or less!) to enhance a brand:

Do something meaningful for a charitable cause. Great examples:
1. Macy’s “Believe” campaign which donated $1 million to the Make-a-Wish foundation after people sent 1 million letters to Macy’s Santa
2. Starbucks “Create Jobs USA” campaign donated $5 million to a fund that would provide low-cost loans to community businesses and 2) encouraging consumers to show their support by purchasing a $5 bracelet at Starbucks with all funds going to the loan fund. More than $1 million was donated by customers in the first two weeks, bring the total contribution to $6 million.
3. Charity Water: Five years in, people have helped them fund more than 4,000 projects around the world to serve over two million people with clean drinking water.

Provide stellar customer service. Top examples include:
1. Zappos
2. LL Bean
3. Nordstrom

Companies that focus on customer service every day – not just once a year – create brand evangelists who help spread the word for them in ways no ad ever will.

Research has repeatedly proven that people trust real and vitrual friends over brands, brands still don’t accept the facts and continue to throw money away on pointless advertising.

Be trustworthy. Trust is earned, not bought. The annual Harris Poll Reputation Study rates companies on 20 different attributes which are then grouped into six different reputation dimensions: Emotional Appeal, Products & Services, Social Responsibility, Vision & Leadership, Workplace Environment, and Financial Performance.

For 2011, Apple wins by a mile.

• Financial Performance – Apple
• Products & Services – Apple
• Vision & Leadership – Apple
• Workplace Environment – Apple
• Social Responsibility – Whole Foods
• Emotional Appeal – Amazon.com

The pattern here is that a brand has to be something people can care about, not just something they can buy.

Bonus Links: These are some of the folks who’ll populate the social media old age home in 20 years or so:
- Self Proclaimed Social Media Guru Count Growth Slows
- Self-proclaimed social media gurus multiplying like rabbits on Twitter
- Down Sparky! Self-Proclaimed Google+ Experts Already Multiplying

On March 1st, Google will not only compromise our privacy on a scale most of us never imagined, it also will change our ability to learn different opinions with their new search and privacy policies. And there’s really not a damn thing you can do about it. I don’t call that Doing No Evil. Do you?

Last week, Google announced changes to its privacy policy. “This stuff matters,” they said, “so we wanted to explain what’s changing, why and what these changes mean for users.” That may be the understatement of the decade.

Having the right to one’s point of view and expressing opinions that are unique to you are among the greatest gifts of democracy and freedom. Differing opinions and viewpoints are what push the human beings ahead, scientifically, economically, intellectually, and spiritually. Google’s new privacy and search policies take that freedom away in large degree by limiting what you learn to what you and your friends already know.

Google will aggregate information from gmail, google search, youtube, Google Adwords, Google wallet (tracking what you buy) and more and combine the information about you so it can deliver more of what it calls “relevant” ads.

Information or photos you have shared with people through gmail (what, you thought your email was private?), Google+ or Picasa are now going to show up in these people’s searches, as theirs will in your searches.

You do have other options.
Read these and then continue to learn why you’d be smart of start using them – hard as it is to leave the mother ship.

Duck Duck Go search engine which claims not to follow you around the Internet for search, ot to collect or share personal information. “That,” they say, “is our privacy policy in a nutshell.”

Ixquick which calls itself “the world’s most private search engine” says it doesn’t record your IP Address https://us2.ixquick.com/eng/protect-privacy.html or use tracking cookies.

Yauba is a brand new yet fully fledged semantic search engine with their own index and a claim to offer truly anonymous search with three levels of privacy. It will soon offer an uncluttered user interface which is easy to use yet holds a number of advanced search options.

Here are tips on preserving your online privacy from The World Privacy Forum. They recommend, for example, using an anonymizing tool like Anonymizer.com which has a pay service and a free service.

Mainly, they recommend breaking our dependency on any one search engine.
- Don’t use Google for search and email.
- Don’t use the same search engine for search and news.
- Don’t accept search engine cookies
- Mix it up – use a variety of search engines for different functions.

However, they note, there is no such thing as 100% online privacy. And there never will be again.

You can only sort of opt-out, because opting out will limit the usefulness of many of Google’s services and even Android phones, which run on Google’s operation system.

Why is this happening?
Greed, my friends: pure and simple. This is happening because there’s no such thing as a free lunch. People want content, email, videos, and social networking to be free, but companies still need to make money. And few things are more enticing to Google’s money-paying customers than data they can use to target ads.

This comes on the heels of Google’s new Search, plus Your World, a feature combining search results from the public web with private information and photos you have shared (or that have been shared with you) through Google+ or Picasa. Because Google’s been following us for a long time.

In Google personalized search, for instance, as Scott Buresh explains, perhaps you’ve shown an interest in the topic of sport fishing in your search queries, while your friend has shown an interest in guitars in his search queries. Over time, as these preferences are made clear to Google, your Google personalized search results for the term “bass will largely be about fish, while your friend’s results for “bass” will be comprised of results that primarily cover bass guitars.

Where does it end? It doesn’t.
Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Google’s gifted founders, have often spoken of their desire to turn their Google search into artificial intelligence, which could be connected directly to our brains. (Really!)

In fact, in a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

The Singularity
Google manifests The Singularity with their new privacy and search policies.

The Singularity refers to smarter-than-human intelligence, direct brain-computer interfaces, biological augmentation of the brain, genetic engineering, ultra-high-resolution scans of the brain followed by computer emulation to enable the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence

Learning is about what you don’t know
The problem is that when all you learn is about what you already are know or have expressed an interest in, you aren’t really learning. You are re-enforcing your existing views, which easily can lead to the view that what you and your friends and acquaintances think is the total of reality. But in fact, you’ll only see a small part of what you could see if other research tools and semantic databases were integrated with Google results.

As you read Google’s new privacy policy, keep in mind the fact that any data Google collects and stores can be sold to other corporations, but also to the government. Laws protecting our privacy are woefully inadequate, and that’s not likely to change in any meaningful way any time soon.

Google says you can use a lot of its services without being logged in and that you are only tracked when you log in. But of course you can’t comment on a video, or post in Google+ or use a lot of other Google services without being logged in. And anyway, as they explain, they’ve been collecting information about us for a long time, they’re just telling us about it now.

Keep in mind though, that Google didn’t steal our privacy. We gave it to them. A long time ago.

Here’s a study in customer service contrasts. Two major sites’ accounts have been hacked lately: Zappos and Facebook. Zappos immediately did right by its customers. Facebook? Not.

Here’s what Zappos did – immediately – for its customers when its database was hacked. It’s called “the right thing.”

And here’s what we all need to learn about passwords to keep our accounts safe.

Over the weekend, 24 million Zappos accounts were hacked and some user data – but not passwords – were compromised. Zappos CEO/founder Tony Hseih immediately emailed customers to say their passwords had been reset as a precaution.

That’s because Zappos, unlike Facebook, is powered by extraordinary customer service and actually gives a hoot about what happens to its customers.

Urging customers to re-set their passwords, Hseih wrote: “We are writing to let you know that there may have been illegal and unauthorized access to some of your customer account information on Zappos.com, including one or more of the following: your name, e-mail address, billing and shipping addresses, phone number, the last four digits of your credit card number (the standard information you find on receipts), and/or your cryptographically scrambled password (but not your actual password).”

Facebook still hasn’t said a word about the 600,000+ user accounts compromised daily and the 45,000 accounts – including mine – that were hacked last week.

In the past few days, Zappos spokespeople were interviewed repeatedly by scores of online and traditional media outlets, and were open about the breach and the steps being taken to prevent it from happening again.

Facebook, meh. You got hacked? Somebody’s using your credit card to make purchases through your Facebook account? Tough petooties. There is no human being you can speak to, and you have to be Sherlock Holmes to find the site’s so-called Security Center. On Twitter, we call that a FAIL.

Experts note that, in and of itself, having a password on one site hacked isn’t too big an issue. You change your password, mitigate the damage, and move forward. The problem is that many – if not most -people use the same password on multiple sites.

What to do to protect yourself from hackers
Robert Siciliano, a McAfee consultant and identity theft expert, told Mashable that he expects whoever hacked Zappos’s site will now sell the data to people who run phishing scams.

To be safe, Siciliano says people who got Hseih’s email should avoid clicking on links that claim to be from either Zappos or their credit card firm over the next few months. Phishing emails and voicemail messages typically ask users to “update” their info, giving hackers access to more potentially damaging data. No legitimate company will ask you for credit card information or passwords via email.

When re-setting your password, Tony Bradley of PC World recommends these safe practices for creating passwords strong enough to resist hacking, but simple enough so you have a prayer of remembering them.

1.No Personal Information. Never use a password that has anything to do with you personally. Even a novice hacker can easily find out your full name, the names of your spouse or children, your pets, or your favorite sports teams.

2.Don’t use real words. Not only should you not use your name or your pet’s name, he says, you shouldn’t use any actual word that can be found in a dictionary. Passwords like that can be easily cracked by password software.

3.Mix Character Types. Passwords are almost always case-sensitive, so use both upper and lower case letters to make it more difficult. To really make it complex, be more creative than just capitalizing the first letter. For example, do “paSswoRd” instead of just “Password”. Better yet, throw in some numbers and special characters to substitute for letters, and do “p@Ssw0Rd”.

4.Create a Passphrase. Some password cracking utilities are also smart enough to use common character substitutions for common words. Cracking “p@ssw0rd” may take longer than cracking “password”, but it will still be relatively trivial to crack because, special characters or not, the password is still “password”.

Instead, he recommends, take your favorite line from a movie, song, or book and convert it to a passphrase. If you like the scene from A Few Good Men when Jack Nicholson is on the stand, take the line “You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth!” and convert it to “Ywtt?Ychtt!”. It has upper case and lower case letters, as well as special characters. It is not a word appearing in any dictionary, yet it is simple for you to remember.

I know I’ve been guilty of ignoring all of Bradley’s recommendations at one time or another, but you can bet it won’t happen again. How about you?

As for Facebook, I’ve been doing just fine without it. Haven’t missed it one little bit.

I’ve said it before, and I’m saying it again. If your customer service sucks, nothing else matters. Are you listening yet Facebook?

Yesterday, an email from my buddy, Toby Bloomberg, founder of All the Single Girlfriends, alerted me to the fact that my Facebook page had been hacked. As it turns out, I’m one of more than 45,000 Facebook users whose Facebook accounts – and most likely also email accounts – have been hacked.

I’m still cleaning up the mess. Facebook certainly hasn’t helped.

Here’s the video I clicked on:

Has Facebook acknowledged the problem? Have they apologized? Have they offered a fix? No way!

Because, as usual, Facebook really could care less about its users’ privacy.

How it happened.
Here’s what happened and what you need to do to prevent your Facebook account from being hacked.
1- I clicked on a video posted in a trusted friend’s page. He’d been hacked too, but didn’t know it, until I email him with the bad news.
2- That apparently let loose the Trojan Ramnit, which has existed in one form or another since at least April 2010, has now “gone social” and is using Facebook to spread.


3- I immediately changed my Facebook password.
4- Firefox also was compromised because every link I opened re-routed to a blank page, or to Facebook.


5- I uninstalled Firefox, downloaded it and re-installed it. The same thing kept happening.
6- I went to my Facebook security settings and discovered that half a dozen apps, including Zynga’s Cityville, had installed themselves in my account and sent me welcome emails.

7- I deleted all the apps, changed my Facebook password again, added my cellphone and another level of security.
8- New apps proliferated.


9- I dug down many layers in Facebook to find the page where you can tell them your account has been hacked. It suggested that you change not only your Facebook password, but also the password of the email you use to log into Facebook.

When any other site gets hacked, and many do, they have the common decency to send out an email to let you know that you should change your password and they tell you what they’ve done to fix the problem and prevent it from happening again.

How to find Facebook’s security information
Security information is on Facebook, buried about six levels deep. Of Facebook’s billion members, 5 million liked the Security Center page, which I guarantee you won’t find in a casual search. Likegate Hint: you have to Like the page to see the information it contains! (Scroll down for how to keep your account safe.)

Facebook? Silent!
A Facebook rep told ZD Net that the information that was stolen was from out of date accounts. Wrong!

And Facebook claimed that most of the hacks happened in Europe. Thousands happened in the US yesterday – including my account.

How to keep your account safe.
So what should you do to keep your Facebook account safe? Besides deleting the whole damn thing? Here are the steps to take:
1- Change your Facebook password. Make it strong. Include numbers and letters. Don’t use the same password you use in other accounts or in email.
2- Go into your account settings and delete any apps that have installed themselves. Review permissions you have given to apps to be sure you still want them to access your account.
3- Log out of Facebook.
4- Change the password in the email account you use to log in to Facebook.
5- Delete your browser and re-download it.
6- Log back in to Facebook. Keep monitoring your account.
7- Log out of Facebook EVERY time you leave it. There simply is no reason to leave it open, because that apparently leaves you more open to being hacked.
8- Turn on https:// browsing in your Facebook settings
9- Don’t accept friend requests from people you don’t know/haven’t met.
10- Don’t click on suspicious links. You’re really not going to win an iPad for clicking on a link.

Consider switching to Google+
At least Google lets you know when they screw up and tells you how to fix it.

Here’s more bad news:
• More than four million Facebook users experience spam daily.
• More than 20% of Facebook newsfeed links currently open viruses
• 600,000 Facebook logins are compromised daily – that’s 7 every second.
Source: Zone Alarm

For their callous and clueless behavior in 2011, the honors go to Netflix, Bank of America, GoDaddy and Verizon.

Each company paid the same price for pissing off their customers – a precipitous hit to the bottom line and a huge loss of business.

The lesson learned by each was the same: if you don’t listen to your customers, they will get angry enough to leave you and they won’t come back.

Social media amplified customer dissatisfaction in real-time, while the companies took anywhere from one day to two months to reverse their unpopular policies. In each case, the company said it was changing its mind in response to customer feedback. And in all cases, the reversal — too little, too late — couldn’t undo damage to reputation and sales.

Why Netflix, Bank of America, Verizon and GoDaddy won What’s Next’s first annual Pissoffy Awards
1- Social media spreads news, good and bad, in real-time and allows people to instantly amplify their point of view through their extended networks.

It’s a big hassle to switch banks or phone companies, but people will leave if you refuse to consider their needs and desires. Once they’ve left, customers won’t give companies a second chance. Each of these companies made people mad enough to bother to move.

2- Responding has to happen in real time.
These companies took an entire day, and in one case, three months, to reverse a bad decision that could and would do potentially irreparable damage to the bottom line.

Within two hours, a company has to acknowledge that it is aware of, and looking into an issue. The announcement has to be made in the medium where the issue arises. If that’s on Twitter, a Tweeted response is necessary. And then the company quickly has to explain how and when the issue will be resolved.

3- If your customer service sucks, nothing else matters.
Nobody had warm, fuzzy feelings about any of the Pissoffy Winners. It doesn’t matter what you sell, or how great it is, if you don’t consider and respond to the needs and desires of your customers. If you have an ongoing relationship with your customers, created by listening and working to satisfy their concerns via social media, they may cut you a break when you make a mistake. The key is to respond quickly and openly. Admit mistakes and move forward. Turn a deaf ear, and you’ll pay the price.

A review of Pissoffy winners’ biggest and most avoidable customer service disasters:

July: Netflix announced that it was splitting its DVD and unlimited streaming services into separate plans, doubling its prices, and changing its name to Quikster.

They took back the plan 23 days later, but it was too late. The company lost roughly 1.5 million customers and stock prices dropped precipitously, from $300 a share, to less than $150.

Oct: Bank of America announced a $5 a month fee for US debit card users to use their debit card for purchases. Amidst huge customer outrage, the bank backed down — two months later.

Twitter, Facebook and blogs fueled the fire, and one customer, Molly Katchpole, a 22 year-old woman from Washington, collected more than 300,000 signatures on a petition circulated via Change.org. This led to a grass roots effort calling for “Bank Transfer Day” when tens of thousands moved their accounts to local banks and credit unions. BOA Stock prices are below $5 a share for the first time since 2009.

“We have listened to our customers very closely over the last few weeks and recognize their concern with our proposed debit usage fee,” David Darnell, co-chief operating officer at Bank of America, said in a statement. Doh!

Oct: GoDaddy announced support of controversial Stop Online Privacy Act (SOPA). The announcement got picked up on Reddit on Dec. 22, 2011 and went viral.

Within a few days, more than 72,000 customers moved their domains from GoDaddy’s hosting service. Protestors included Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Ashton Kucher, and Cheezburger’s Ben Huh. (as in I Can Has Cheeseburger, FAIL Blog) @benhuh Tweeted “We’ll move our 1,000 domains off @godaddy unless you drop support of SOPA. We love you guys but #SOPA-is-cancer to the Free Web.”

Dec: Verizon. A leaked internal Verizon memo announced that, beginning Jan 15, 2012, Verizon would follow in Sprint’s footsteps and charge customers $2 “single payment fee” if they opted to pay their wireless bill online or over the phone. The only way to avoid the fee would be to pay by electronic check or sign up for AutoPay to take the money directly from your bank account or credit card.

Within hours, 95,000 people had signed an online petition protesting the charge. The reversal, just one day after announcing the fee, also came after the industry regulator, the Federal Communications Commission, told The New York Times it would investigate the matter “on behalf of American consumers.”

Verizon reversed the announcement, saying “The company made the decision in response to customer feedback about the plan, which was designed to improve the efficiency of those transactions.”

Perhaps they should get a prize for fastest reversal of the year.

“The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
And the first one now will later be last
Cause the times they are a changin’”
Bob Dylan

Newt Gingrich was punked today by the political action group The American Bridge 21st Century, which bought NewtGingrich.com, and is selling it for $1 million or the highest bid.

The URL re-directs to negative articles about the GOP frontrunner, and to Tiffany’s, where he ran up a $50,000 tab, and to Greek Cruise Lines, among others.

And I just bought Newt-Gingrich-Lies.com and Newt-Gingrich-Cheats.com – both of which I’d be happy to sell for a minimum bid of a mere $150K each.

We are 30 years into the Internet Age, and it is mind-boggling that none of the geniuses surrounding the candidate for President of the United States had the smarts to reserve every negative URL anyone could possible think of about Newt. No-Newts.com is available too, if you want to buy it.

There seriously is no excuse for this level of ignorance. But hey, this is a fun game. Do Join in!

Here are some tools that do a really good job of helping brands track, respond, and build relationships. These tools will help you learn who’s talking about your industry, your competitors, and your brand, and what they’re saying. They range from free to reasonably priced.

The bottom line is that no one tool that I’ve investigated (and I’ve tried several dozen) can do the whole job. Combining a few of these is the best way to go.

• SamePoint is a somewhat geeky but remarkably thorough conversation search engine that tracks – in real time and historically – and categorizes social media mentions, discussion points, bookmarks, wikis, networks, groups, microblogs, reviews, podcasts, documents, video, images, news and websites. Accounts range from free to $1,000 per month.

• Spiral16 is a paid service with a human-guided data-validation process and 3D visual mapping, which allows clients to get comprehensive data in a visual format. Spiral16 picks up data from social media, reference sites, directories, and non-traditional trade publications. Pricing starts at $500.

• PageLever “If you think Facebook Insights leaves something to be desired, you’re not alone,” says PageLever.” If you’re responsible for managing a Facebook page, PageLever puts Facebook’s own weak analytics on steroids. The demo video (http://pagelever.com/tour) will show you how it works. Prices range from $34 to $250 a month.

• SproutSocial creates a dashboard for monitoring social media relationships across Twitter, Facebook (fan and personal pages) and LinkedIn. You can search, monitor and cross-post to networks, schedule messages to be posted, as well as track links and referrals. Prices range from $39 a month for up to 20 profiles, up to $899 a month for the enterprise version and unlimited profiles.

• Vitrue is a social media content management system for brand pages in Twitter and Facebook. You can create and schedule messages for Twitter and Facebook, and you can use Vitrue Apps to create custom videos, photo slideshows, polls, surveys, coupons and other marketing tools for Facebook. Month-to-month licenses in three price plans begin at $300 a month.
Besides letting you upload videos to multiple sites simultaneously, TubeMogul, TubeMogul has recently developed a rich set of metrics that let you see stats on how many people have watched your videos across various networks.

In real-time, you’ll get a dashboard showing views, audience geography, time spent, embeds, referring sites, search terms and lots more. And it’s free.

A sampling of CRM Database Management Tools
Once you’ve got a picture of who’s talking about your brand, you can engage with them with using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) database tools tools including:

• Assistly lets you create a desktop dashboard of all your customer service conversations. You can collect, prioritize and respond to them all in one well-designed, easy-to-use space. Every employee can use Assistly to provide customer response by phone, email, Twitter, or chat. You can try it free.

• Batchbook neatly combines Facebook, Google, and your contact database. It lets you view blog posts, photos, tweets, and more alongside your customer contact history. Prices range from $14.95 to $149 per month.

• If you use Google Gmail, Rapportive will show the contact information for the person whose email you’re reading, just to the right of your inbox. Instead of ads in the right column, you’ll also see links and details from LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and numerous other social sites that the writer uses.

The bottom line: engaging with your customers in social media channels is simply an updated version of fishing where the fish are.

Cartoon: Hugh Macleod, gapingvoid