This is a guest post by Shannon Paul (find her on Twitter, too).  A prolific online personality, in her “day job” Shannon is the communications manager for PEAK6 Online.

On the PR/marketing side of the equation we know good products go unnoticed without proper promotion, but we’re often reluctant to make the same admission about content.

If it makes you feel better, I’m not going to blame this problem on the proliferation of new channels of communication brought on by social media, etc. But, please know that great content does not market itself.

Rather than going on about social media and my signal-to-noise ratio, I’m going to show you how many good things went unnoticed with a short list of some of my favorite long-ignored great works of content:

1. Freaks and Geeks:  Like most of the world’s population, I missed this brilliant television series when it first aired in 1999.  Despite brilliantly delivering on the tagline, “what high school was like for the rest of us,” the show was only broadcast for one season. However, the show was the launch pad for of a lot of talent you might recognize today, including Judd Apatow,  Seth Rogen, Jason Segel and James Franco. Not only was it set in a suburban high school in Detroit (my hometown), but it’s the only sitcom that ever relied on Star Wars, Dungeons and Dragons, and the Grateful Dead to inform much of the humor and plot.

2. Nick Drake: During his lifetime, not one of Drake’s albums sold more than 5,000 copies. By the time he finished his last album, Pink Moon, he decided to retire from music altogether.  He died at the age of 26 from an apparent drug overdose that was ruled a suicide.  His music is beautiful.  I wish the world had loved his music while he was alive to feel it.  Listen to Pink Moon.

3. The Shawshank Redemption: Yes, it’s true that this movie tops most best-ever lists, but when released in 1994 it was a box office dud. There are a lot of theories around why such a great film performed so poorly in theaters, but theories are just that. Rest assured, everyone’s favorite bro-mance between Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins went on to become one of the highest-grossing movie rentals of all time.

Chalk each of these examples to a case of wrong place/wrong time, but I happen to think solid PR and marketing could have made a big difference in each of these instances.

In social media circles, we talk a lot about how to inspire word-of-mouth and connect consumers with one other, but in each of these instances, word-of-mouth triumphed over a lack of good publicity — not because of it.

These days, there’s this notion that if you have a lot of great content on your site, you can sit back and let the content work for you.  Great content is a great start, but content marketing is still about relationships.

Four ways to foster relationships with your web-based content:

Outbound links: Yes, it’s true, linking to other content might send some people away from your site. However, most people pay attention to sources of inbound traffic and links since it helps them meet their goals of increased traffic and page rank. While it’s not a one-to-one formula, outbound linking tends to encourage inbound linking. What I mean here is when someone sees your incoming link and recognizes the synergy between your content and their content, they often return the favor by linking to your content.

Comments: Comment on other peoples’ and companies’ blogs with the intention of participating in a conversation they started. Don’ t comment in an effort to steal someone else’s traffic — that’s just rude. Done correctly, the relationship will provide a lot more value in the long-term than a few curious clicks.

Resource-rich Blog Content: While it’s still important to serve journalists content they think will be useful for their readership, now it’s equally as important to create direct-to-consumer content (or direct-to-customer content if your business is B2B). If you’re doing this, remember to talk about something other than your product and deliver something they can’t get anywhere else.

Guest Posting: I’m a guest post here on Todd’s blog, but writing content for others in your industry or customer space helps establish relationships with new readers and with the person managing the site.

If you think I left something out of this list, let’s discuss in the comments.

Much like great products, great content will only find the best people to love it if it’s leveraged well. If your content hasn’t found its sweet spot yet, don’t fret — you’re in good company.  Keep trying new angles and formulas for success.

I’ve written more than once in the past about the need for marketers to avoid Shiny Object Syndrome and, more recently, to Think Organically when it comes to Social Media.

Guess what?  Not everybody reads my blog.

As we have found ourselves increasingly competing not just against PR firms but against different types of marketing agencies, e.g., advertising, marcomm, branding, we have on occassion lost the bid because the Other Guys wowed the underinformed prospect with the snazziest aspects of Social Media.

Will these happy-shiny approaches work?  Likely not.  But after you’ve spent a million hours developing a sophisticated, achievable proposal (on spec), that’s cold comfort.

Fact is, people like shiny objects.  People like big, swing-for-the-fences ideas.  Hell, we do, too!

The trick, I guess, is to “find the line” between ambition and realism.  And the challenge to finding that line is that the more you know about how goddamn hard it is to create sustained successful programs, the more you may tend to underpromise/overdeliver.

That’s called being too smart for your own good.

Lesson learned.

Many brands will use a microsite – a single-purpose li’l website – to serve as a landing page for a new advertising/branding/marketing/social media campaign.

This FEELS like it makes sense.

Most brands are too “big” to allow a one-off campaign of any sort to dramatically affect their official corporate website … yet, corporations spend enough $$$ on such initiatives that they want to maximize the investment; and, for fans of the newly rolled-out campaign, a microsite is a handy, utilitarian place to show off more multimedia assets, aggregate conversations related to the campaign, etc.

Why it might NOT make sense?  It’s rare to see a microsite with any real traction.

Have a look at Stride Gum’s “Save the Arcades” microsite.  As an avid (if rusty) gamer who’s plunked down far too many quarters in my day, you can count me as a booster of neighborhood videogame arcades.  But does a site like this have anything more than niche appeal?

Maybe I’m having a curmudgeonly morning, but are we so swept up in our belief in the Long Tail that we’re willing to spend thousands upon thousands of marketing dollars using a nit-comb to find a new brand fan?

How many visitors must a microsite get to make it worthwhile?  Would just a few thousand visitors be considered a success, for the money spent on ideation and creative execution?  These microsites don’t tend to get millions of eyeballs.

On the plus side, Stride Gum did think enough of the “Save the Arcades” campaign to prominently feature it on its Facebook Fan Page, which counts over 350,000 fans… but I don’t see anything more than the static microsite image, and no “discussions” of the arcade-salvation campaign across this vast user base.

What I did see on the Facebook page was plenty of consumers willing to engage on quick & simple stuff they’d spotted in their Newstream, e.g., when Stride asks, “What’s Your Favorite Flavor?” plenty of folks leapt to answer.  It’s quick.  It’s simple. It’s free.  Yet it reminds thousands of Stride’s known fans of the brand loyalty they originally expressed when they first tapped the “Become a Fan” icon.

When DOES a microsite make sense?  I need to answer this because a) it’s not always a bad idea and b) we are building one for a client!

I think a microsite makes sense when you are part of a highly regulated industry, e.g., Financial Services or Pharmaceuticals, which need to be scrupulously careful about content, disclosures, and consumer engagement.

If Pfizer creates a Fan Page for Viagra (there are some on Facebook that one can be pretty sure were fan-created), and some poor guy posts about his gruesome episode of priapism, Pfizer personnel need to scurry about reporting adverse events to the FDA, wondering about whether it is kosher to delete that guy’s post from the Wall, etc.  And what happens when a far happier customer graphically describes how he’s being intimate with his wife for the first time in years?  Good message, but inappropriate details.  “Do we delete?” types of questions arise.  And so on.  A microsite can tame these tricky issues.

A microsite also makes sense if the brand is willing to Go Big.  If the advertising campaign is gonna be HUGE, long-lasting, brand-changing, then yea, you can rightfully expect a million+ consumers are gonna tap some keywords into Google, and you want them to find “a separate place” where they can interact with additional content.

Dos Equis’s “Stay Thirsty, My Friends” campaign is a great example.  A microsite for such a compelling campaign is appropriate.  Only problem is that this particular site is bloated with Flash, boasts terrible navigation, and doesn’t feature The Interesting Man!  Still, my son and I laughed over the several additional commercial-grade videos that found their way to YouTube (like this one: The Most Interesting Man in the World: on “Rollerblading”).  A well-designed microsite that promoted additional content like these “minisodes” would have been sought-after and well-received.

At the end, all I am really suggesting to brand marketers is that they think long & hard about developing microsites.  They absolutely have their place, but given a likely dearth of eyeballs, the pay-off for most consumer brands will often be hard to determine.

But maybe the best way to conclude this micro treatise is with the alternate title I’d considered for this post.

Microsites: Go Big, or Go To Facebook.

I’ve met with several advertising executive honchos in recent weeks, from agencies large and small.  The topic?  No surprise.  Social Media.  These advertising execs are gung-ho about Social Media; it is generating cool, surprising and lucrative new opportunities for their agencies.  But as the “campaign” becomes the “commonplace,” challenges rear up…  

Here’s the gist of our conversations with the Ad Agency executives:

Advertising Exec: “Thanks for coming by.  We know you guys ‘get’ Social Media.  We get it, too; we love it in fact — but …”

PR Guy: “But it all starts to fall apart once you get past the campaign level?”

Advertising Exec: “Yea, yea, well, kind of… Don’t get me wrong, we can develop some community-appropriate and rockstar-level creative that helps start the conversations, even get a ton of fans or followers or whatever, but …”

PR Guy: “But then you have to feed that beast, right?  You feel this voracious need to fill up the channel with new and excellent content, which is an expensive burden, both financially and creatively.”

Advertising Exec: “Yes, and then …”

PR Guy: “And then you also need to monitor these conversations and engage at a peer level in real-time, and also guide the client in how to react quickly, appropriately, and candidly themselves.”

Advertising Exec: “Yes!! And that’s not what we do.”

PR Guy: “Yep, I get it.  You guys craft brilliant campaigns but the ‘relationships’ part feels low-level, mundane, hard-to-do, and fraught with risk as you engage with every Tom, Dick & Wierdo online.”

Advertising Exec: “See?  I knew you ‘got it.’”

I have nothing but respect for the Advertising industry.  Notice I use words like brilliant, rockstar, creative, etc., up above. 

Whether “PR” or “Advertising” drive Social Media strategy has very little to do with which discipline better understands the New World Order.  It has more to do with which group is better prepared to wade in — and never leave — the proverbial community pool.

I am working on a number of responses to RFPs that easily rank in the “OMFG” category, in terms of both the caliber of the prospective clients as well as the level of work required by the responses themselves.  A good problem to have, and I am not complaining.

But as you may already have noticed, posts to the blog and even Twitter have slowed considerably.

Until I can get back to a more regular schedule, I leave you with this quick, fun video created for our clients at Movember, by the director of the recent hit ZOMBIELAND.

Movember is dedicated to raising awareness of the perils of prostate cancer, and its signature event is a global moustache-growing frenzy in the month of November.  I am tentatively planning to shave off my 10+ year old goatee and re-growing a bushy trucker mo’ next month (my wife is less than thrilled but supports the cause)!

I’ll be back to regular blog posting when I can.  Meanwhile I hope you’ll wish us luck on those RFPs — and on beating the crap outta prostate cancer!!

We were in a pitch earlier this week with a name-brand company.  High pressure.  After the dog-and-pony part of the meeting, in the afterglow as we were saying our good-byes, we got some candid feedback from one of the prospective client contacts.  She said:

“This presentation was different than the others we’ve been hearing.  Yes, it’s true that we talked a lot about Social Media, but you guys didn’t break out every shiny marble.  It felt more … organic.”

I smiled. That was good to hear.  “That’s because we didn’t come here to talk about Social Media for Social Media’s sake,” I said.  “We came to talk about engagement for engagement’s sake.”

When evaluating a prospective partner’s Social Media expertise, or when doing your own planning, I advise keeping Forrester Research’s POST methodology in mind.  POST stands for People, Objectives, Strategy and Technology.

Put the people first: who are they, where do they hang out, what do they care about, what do they avoid?

Once you know these fundamental attributes of your audiences, the obvious parts of the program (the where, when, why) readily present themselves and all that’s left is a burst of creativity to make the ideas for engagement (the how) really sticky, impactful and fun.

At any given time, there are probably 150 different media pitches being drafted at our agency.  We’re trying to get influencers interested in new companies, new products, new features, new ideas.

Most of these pitches are quick, pithy, and impactful. 

Some are overstuffed. The “overstuffed” pitches tend to be the ones that our clients insist on helping us craft.  These clients are anxious about ensuring that every point is convincingly addressed for the prospective writer.

In order to catch the proverbial fish, the PR pro puts a worm on a hook.  To catch that same fish, many marketers prefer to present a fully-prepared platter to the roiling oceans — and invite the fishies to hop onto the plate.

It’s true that more than ever, the PR team needs to present a complete package to the journalists, i.e., client execs, customer contacts, briefed analysts, and market trend proofpoints.  But, those accoutrements tend to work best after the fish is on-the-hook.

To give antsy clients some confidence that yes, the fish will be caught, it’s important to remind them of the premise of “Failing Fast.”  Once the PR team is equipped with a strong core storyline, they should be free to adjust their approach to pitching on-the-fly, without the need for further approval cycles. 

Pitch #1 ain’t working?  Try Pitch #2 with a different spin.  Still not catching fish?  Try the more (aggressive? surprising? weird? mysterious?) Pitch #3.  And so on. 

This can and should happen within hours, not days, and there’s little need for the client to be involved in each pitch cycle since they already presumably a) hired an agency they trust and b) approved the core storyline.

That’s not to say I’m advocating that clients ignore the process or (more crudely) “just let us do our jobs.” 

Rather, successful programs are marked by clients who help with all the advance spadework to craft a strong approach, and subsequently check-in to see how they might help the agency reps further season the story as needed — sometimes on an hour-by-hour or journalist-by-journalist basis. 

It’s never about panic or recrimination in such cases.  It’s about reeling in the fish.

Many agencies looking to capitalize on the Social Media wave decided to create specialized groups — an “agency within the agency” — to hone in on this area.

Don’t be fooled.

This Social Media stuff looks like a scary hairy mosh-pit to traditional marketers, so it’s safer, cheaper and easier to devote resources to a “separate” division.

Safer because failure is a less frightening option when confined to a small group.  If the “Social Media Department” fails, it can be shut down or re-tooled without impacting the agency’s core business.

Cheaper because these agencies tend to hire one expensive rockstar and surround them with a handful of freshly-graduated (read: cheap) worker bees.

Easier because it is actually quite hard to get up-to-speed and stay current on this fast-moving Web 2.0 stuff, especially when the traditional Media Relations and Client Service work continues to be quite intensive.

Time is money.  Training is arduous and expensive.  Failure (especially in this economic climate) is scary as hell, especially cuz failures nowadays tend to be more public and more impactful.  Betting everything on making the entire agency Social Media savvy is a tough pill to swallow.

But what is safer, cheaper and easier for the agency is rarely in the best interests of the client.  In fact when you “bolt on” a specialized group of Social Media rockstars, you do a disservice to the client (short-term) but also to the rest of the agency (long-term).

The Social Media Dept. in this scenario is likely to be in ever-higher demand.  But, tasked with serving the needs of ALL of the firm’s clients, their ability to focus and counsel on both fundamental issues (“what’s our social media strategy?”) and little flare-ups (“somebody tweeted about us!”) becomes increasingly diluted.  This is an issue of SCALE.

There’s also the question of “where’s the line?”  Say a journalist starts tweeting or becomes a freelance blogger.  Who now owns the relationship — is it OK that the “traditional” PR pro wants to maintain the relationship, even though the channel supposedly “belongs” to their peers in the Social Media Department?  This is an issue of RESPONSIBILITY.

Furthermore, the Social Media Dept. will tend to drink a li’l too much of their own Kool Aid.  It’s not long before both clients and their fellow staffers from the “traditional” side of the agency start to question their rationality.  To a man with a hammer, every challenge looks like a nail.  “Social” is not always the right answer.  This is an issue of STRATEGY.

Most egregiously, the agency that takes the time to create and market this specialized unit is looking at it as a standalone profit center.  In other words, they’ll often charge extra for Social Media counseling and services.  This to me seems like a cynical exploitation of the clients’ fears and doubts re: these new shiny objects.  This is an issue of GREED.

Meanwhile as social technologies become a more ever-present part of the media landscape, the PR staff working the mainstream end of the business will find themselves sucked into Social Media in order to do their “traditional” jobs well.  This may be mostly tactical work like “following journalists on Twitter,” but, as Social Media infiltrates this workforce from the bottom-up, the heretofore All-Things-Social-Media Dept. will be relegated to increasingly “strategic” discussions: a trendline that eventually requires less staff and more ROI proof, which is threatening both to the fiefdom owner and agency owner, respectively.

An integrated approach is not only increasingly essential but just plain smarter for all concerned.  And that is an issue of INTEGRITY.

While I was not able to attend the Inbound Marketing Summit this year, I soon heard about Hubspot CEO Brian Halligan’s indictment of the PR industry.  Perhaps sensing a need to elaborate on his main points, Brian wrote a follow-up post today that despite its provocative title is thoughtful and largely spot-on.  Please go have a look.  Then come back, cuz this post is a response to Brian’s thoughts on how the PR industry needs to evolve.

“Bad PR” (spam) is dying.  Thank god.  Most good firms are fast evolving towards the services Brian mentions, e.g., Social Media training, monitoring and idea-spreading … Marketing Strategy … SEO, and so on.  There’s little in Brian’s post that will come as a shock to any progressive PR agency.

Meanwhile, knowing Brian as a I do, I was not all that surprised to find him basically ignoring the importance of the mainstream media.  He is, in my opinion, far too quick to discount the role of mainstream media relations (as discussed in-depth in an earlier post: Mainstream Media Relations: More Important Than Ever).  Brian is a very savvy, cutting-edge kind of guy who is laser-focused on online lead generation.  There is a softer side to that science that he’s simply uninterested in — but that doesn’t make it irrelevant.

There is also simply so much that goes on behind-the-scenes at all good PR agencies that is most definitely of-value yet never seen in the outside world.  While I applaud Brian’s focus on expanding the size of the funnel (lead dev), there are more nuanced activities that go on:  positioning, messaging, crisis communications, relationship-building, training, etc.  Such activities minght only offer a tangential or indirect impact on lead development, but, they are still critically important to companies of all sizes.

In any event I am tired of “PR is dead” memes.  It’s played out.  Linkbait.

At SHIFT we are too busy working with our faces forward into the wind to sweat about the waning days of Old-School Thinking.  The fate of the PR industry does not define me, my agency, nor our fate.

Disclosure: Hubspot was a SHIFT client.  We were delighted to help launch the company and still maintain a warm & respectful relationship with all of their principals. (Hi guys!)

Charlene Li & Jeremiah Owyang of The Altimeter Group posted today about Google’s Social Media ambitions.  Here’s an excerpt of the key takeaway:

Google isn’t going after a frontal, brute force assault on Facebook and the other social networks — it simply can’t win at that game on a global basis. Instead Google is pursuing a softer approach, a zen-like attach much like water flowing around a rock.  It is using its strengths — ubiquity and open platforms — to put “social” into every corner of the Web.

This is the stealth threat — that today’s social networks won’t really be losing share to the “Google network”, but rather, that they will become slowly less relevant as EVERYTHING gets social thanks to advances by Google.

This inspired a lot of thinking on my part and I left a comment that I’ll pass along here, for your own brain fodder:

Is there a scenario in which Facebook and Google can play nice, or is a clash inevitable?

What role, if any, will Microsoft play in this scene? They seem to be resurgent in some areas and have the patience of Buddha in terms of marketshare gains.

What would Google’s reaction be, do you think, if (for example) some major brands objected to tools like Sidewiki that could “hijack” the conversations about their brands (in a place that is literally too close to home, i.e., appended to their homepages)? Would GOOG re-trench and re-think rather than stand tall against a raft of complaints?

Would the smart marketer be better advised to bet their budgets on Google or Facebook? For example, bloggers are already faced with adding FB Connect *or* GOOG Connect (or Twitter for that matter), to log-in users. That’s a long-term bet, really, as you wouldn’t want to change horses after gaining a good ### of readers…

And what about Twitter? Using Tweetie on the iPhone gives one a good sense for how surfing the Web “within” a Twitter interface might work, and it works rather well. Makes one wonder about the upstart’s own long-term plans/vision?

OK, now, dear readers.  Let’s say you are in charge of marketing at a FORTUNE 1000 company.  You have decided to make a long-term bet on ONE of these highly-hyped Social Networks.  Do you spend it on GOOGLE or FACEBOOK or TWITTER?  Which one do you suspect will have the greatest impact your success as a marketer?