Usually, such a question comes spring-loaded with a belief that Social Media is for the “youngins,” but I wanted to clarify this assumption before answering.

The man described his client, an upscale restaurant with an older demographic audience with income of over $150,000 per year, etc…

I explained that traditional demographic data doesn’t account for passion. Upscale diners are typically foodies who want to know every detail about their food, from the presentation, to the ingredients, to the preparation techniques. They like to exchange stories, recipes and share new dining experiences with other foodies. They watch “Top Chef,” “Iron Chef,” and scoff at Chef Boyardee. Therefore, if online content exists for them to satisfy these passionate cravings, then yes, they are an appropriate audience for Social Media.

Think about categorizing Social Media users more by their passions than by their age. For example, the average age of a Harley Davidson owner is 47 years old — not typically considered the “Social Media demographic.” Yet, the Harley Davidson’s Facebook fan page has over 178,000 fans!

Think passion, not age, income, etc… Find where your passionate customers live online. Then create content that helps them satisfy their informational cravings.

Good online content is to passionate customers like honey is to bears are to honey.

Photo Credit: jameschip

Tags: passionographics demographics Social Networking New Media Evangelist

Your New Media Evangelist has nothing against the word by itself, but when placed before the word “video,” both my systolic and diastolic blood pressure measurements increase significantly.

The phrase creates a distortion field that inhibits a communicator’s ability to focus, frequently putting them into a delusional state of believing that they’re the next Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino, or Tim Street.

I’m begging you. For the love of all that’s holy, please eliminate the phrase “viral video” from your pre-production vocabulary. Trust me, the phrase will drain all of your budget and leave you with moving pictures that your kids will call “lame.”

Instead of trying to manufacture million of downloads, try creating useful videos that tell good stories. If millions of people just happen to forward that video to all of their friends, then I’ll consider lifting my embargo. But not before.

A video’s virality can only be determined AFTER it is released.

Tags: viral video viral embargo eliminate ronamok ronploof New Media Evangelist

At the end of the session, a woman asked how a pharmaceutical company like the one she worked for could use online video. She understood how it could be used for business-to-consumer applications. She understood how companies who sold business-to-business could use it. Her question was how to use video in an industry that was regulated by the Food and Drug administration (FDA).

As a New Media Evangelist who helps companies tell their stories online, I run into this question constantly. If it’s not the FDA and the pharmaceutical industry, it’s FINRA for the financial industry, or the FTC for publicly traded companies.

So I went on a quest. My goal was to find a company who works in a regulated industry yet was using New/Social Media successfully. What I found was more than I could have expected.

I found Johnson & Johnson, a 123 year old, $64 billion holding company that had not only been using YouTube successfully, but that it had two blogs, Kilmer House and JNJ BTW, a Twitter account, and was experimenting with a Facebook Group. And as I studied the series of events that transpired to enable this success, I stumbled upon a road map that any company can use to develop its Social Media strategy.

Here I present the results of my research in my latest e-book:

Johnson & Johnson Does New Media

The e-book is licensed under Creative Commons, so please feel free to pass it around!

The first part of any New/Social Media strategy is to create compelling content that draws an audience–an effort that takes time. Celebrities like Oprah, Ellen, or Shaq, don’t have this lead-time problem. Since they can mobilize their existing fan base quickly, they can skip over the “building an audience” phase and go straight to the “interacting with the audience” phase.

A couple months ago, your New Media Evangelist described how Shaquille O’Neil interacts with his audience through Random Acts of Shaqness. Recently, I witnessed another one.

On May 27th, my Tweetdeck/Twitscoop window displayed two words looming large: “Kirstie” and “Alley.” At first I feared that something terrible had happened to the actress who I’d come to know as a neurotic barkeep on the television show Cheers. Thankfully, however, instead of reading of her untimely demise, I found that @kirstiealley was in the middle of a Twitter experiment with her then 28,838 followers.

CONTEST:$300 PRIZE. FILL IN THE BLANK. A “DAY IN THE LIFE SHOW” OF KIRSTIE ALLEY..SHOULD BE CALLED————— GOOOO!!!!

At 9:50 a.m., exactly 53 minutes after posting the challenge, she announced the winning entry:

@Boomstone AND THE WINNER IS….”DON’T CALL ME KRISTIE” YAYYYYYYYYYYYY tough call (a few versions of this so went verbatum) yayyyyyyy

• $300 per new show title?
• 15 cents per entry?
• 37.7 entries per minute?

So, what are you asking of your audience?

Kistie Alley Shaq Oprah Ellen Twitscoop audience chris brogan ron ploof

Technologies in and of themselves are not very interesting. What people do with them, however, is. I’m fascinated with how people USE new technologies in their day-to-day lives.

Take Twitter for example. Standalone, the technology is new and interesting. But it wasn’t until I began using a desktop Twitter client called Tweetdeck that I noticed some self-behavioral changes.

I’ve found that the TwitScoop column in Tweetdeck is where I get all of my breaking news. Consisting of a tag cloud, the column represents Twitter’s trending topics. The larger the word, the more frequently it’s being used in Twitter-based conversations.

Last Tuesday, I returned to my computer after a few hours of client meetings to find the image above waiting for me. It didn’t take much imagination to see that the California Supreme Court had issued its ruling on “Prop 8,” the measure that banned same sex marriages in last November’s elections. The ruling caused such an emotional response that the Twitterverse lit-up with every conceivable opinion.

Tweetdeck was where I first heard about the plane that splash-landed in the Hudson. Tweetdeck is where I first heard saw the words “Mumbai” and “terrorists” — both examples arriving in Tweetdeck long before the mainstream press had a reporter on the scene. It has become the defacto place for your New Media Evangelist to get his breaking news.

How are New Media technologies influencing your day-to-day habits?

Tags:Twitter Tweetdeck Twitscoop Breaking-news New Media Evangelist

One gentleman was there to promote himself for a new job. He described himself as a 20-year veteran of the apparel industry and when I asked for specifics, he rattled off manufacturing facts for all kinds of apparel, from sportswear to denim.

Impressed with his knowledge, I asked, “Do you have a blog?”

Sheepishly, he said that he didn’t. His next words were something that I hear often. “I should, but I just don’t know what to write about.”

Grrr…this answer really gets me going, because too many people sell themselves short. Everyone has a unique perspective on the world and Apparel Guy is not the exception. With 20 years of experience, he obviously has unique knowledge that a very specific audience would love to tap into.

About five minutes later, a trendy looking, twenty-something wearing a sports jacket, white shirt and stone-washed bluejeans, wandered over to our little group.

Somehow, the subject of denim came up and Apparel Guy transformed before our very eyes. The same dude who earlier claimed that he had nothing to write about launched into an enthusiastic explanation on how Trendy Guy’s pants were manufactured. Without taking a breath, he did a similar analysis of another guy’s jeans–guessing that they were probably cheaper because they hadn’t gone through as many processing steps as Trendy Guy’s had.

Apparel Guy was PASSIONATE about DENIM. He knew more about denim than anyone else I’d ever met and he loved to talk about it.

I interrupted him midstream. “I thought you didn’t know what to write about,” I said through a sarcastic smile. “You need to write a blog about denim.”

“I could do that!” he said, before jumping back to thread counts, weave patterns, and softening techniques.

What are you knowledgeable and passionate about? Do you have a blog?

Photo Credits:

Flickr Photostream from Six Revisions

Flickr Photostream from Chris Lorenz (@chrislorenz on Twitter)

Tags: blogging resume job-seeker passion experience denim New Media Evangelist

With the help of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying, I’m going to demonstrate the five stages that every journalist/editor/PR/ marketing professional must experience in order to become productive members of our new communications economy:

denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Denial: New Media? Pshaw, just a fad. User-generated content? Ha! Too unprofessional. Blogs? Gimme a break. Nobody wants to read some feety-pajamas-wearing-teenager rant about the New World Order from his parent’s basement. Youtube? Sure, let’s all gather ’round the computer screen to watch skateboarding dogs and candy-powered soda fountains.  Facebook and Twitter? Pahleeze. As if I care what some pipsqueak in Peoria is doing right now. C’mon people. Communications is serious business that must be left to the pros.

Anger: WTF? I got a pink slip because some blender manufacturer got over six-million views for grinding up an iphone? Are you serious? You call that professional marketing? And what in the name of Walter Cronkite happened to news reporting? A couple bloggers get lucky with a  Trent Lott and Dan Rather story, and I’m filling out forms for unemployment insurance? Some dude on a ferry beats CNN and MSNBC by publishing the first photo of a plane crash on the Hudson and I’m playing eenie-meenie-miney-moe with COBRA health insurance plans? Damn the amateurs. Damn them to hell!

Bargaining: Have you come to your senses yet, boss? I’m a professional (fill-in-the-blank). I write objective/balanced stories. I leverage my relationships with the media to get my company/client stories covered. I write and blast snappy marketing messages at our customers. I’ve got awards, dammit! Please take me back. Pleeeeez? Stella! Stella!

Depression: Everything on the Internet is crap. Nobody reads the newspaper anymore. Who wants to curl up and read with a portable media device for cryin’ out loud?  Nobody wants to pay for the pros anymore. How will society survive without paid professionals covering the world for us? Where’s the money? Where’s my newspaper? Hey kid, get off my lawn!

Acceptance: It’s over. The audiences have moved. For better or worse, consumers have changed their behaviors. They get their news, information, and entertainment from different places than our parents did. And they aren’t willing to pay for much for it, either. Newspapers are bankrupt; the journalists that I used to pitch are all unemployed; and the trade shows that I used to spend a King’s ransom on are almost empty. I need to look in different places, talk with different people, and offer different types of content creation services.

Because it’s not about me; it’s about my audience. If I focus on taking care of them, they’ll take care of me.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Thanks to Julie Wright for the inspiration for this post!

Tags: Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Death and Dying Intervention New Media Evangelist denial anger bargaining depression acceptance

“I hear you, Ron. But my customers don’t use social networks.”

In the past, I’d try to reason with them. Today, I just restate the observation as a question. “None of your customers use social networks? Seriously? Isn’t that like saying that none of them talk, eat, or breath in and out?”

People are social beings. We crave connection and have always used the tools of the day to satisfy that need. In the past, we’d gather physically, through  faith communities, sporting events, and trade organizations. Over time, we adopted new technologies that allowed us to network without a physical presence through devices such as the telephone, CB radios, and email. Today, web-based social media tools simply offer us more choices to network.

Do all of our customers have a Facebook page, use Twitter, or read blogs regularly? Of course not.  But the odds are that they know someone who does and then it’s only a matter of time before they watch a YouTube video, get an email with a hyperlink to a user-generated product review, or receive an invitation to Linkedin. In any one of these cases, a customer is a simple mouse click away from adding a social media tool to their existing social networking outlets.

I’ve found that those who claim that their customers don’t communicate with other humans using Internet-enabled tools are actually making a comment about themselves. They don’t want to change, preferring to complete today’s tasks with yesterday’s tools.

Read the history books. That strategy has never been a winning one.

Photo Credit: Library of Congress

Tags: New Media Social Media Social Networking Traditionals Old School

As your company takes on the role of “publisher” through the use of blogs, podcasts, and online video, it’s important to educate your content creators as to the proper use of OPC.

This morning, my good friend Harry, the author of Harry…The ASIC Guy blog, asked me about a post he found on an EDA vendor’s community page. Evidently, the author had cut and pasted a large percentage of Harry’s most recent post into the company’s community user forums.

I’m not lawyer, so I’ll leave the finer points of “fair use” and the risks associated with OPC to your corporate counsel. Instead, I want to address the problem from the perspective of being a good netizen.

Rather than copying and pasting large portions of OPC, it’s normal and customary to write original commentary about an article, perhaps pulling a small quote or two to make a point, but leaving the vast majority of the OPC on the original website. If readers want to learn more from the original source, they can follow the hyperlink provided. Such a practice creates the best of both worlds: you’re company enjoys the benefits of a conversation-starter and the original author enjoys the benefits of an inbound link for potential new readers.

I believe that the person who posted Harry’s article did so with the best of  intentions. He did in fact offer hyperlinks to Harry’s original content, as he also did with articles that were cut & pasted from sources such as  EETimes and The Wall Street Journal! Unfortunately, the law doesn’t take into account good intentions, so rather than taking unnecessary risks, a little corporate education in the proper use of OPC can go a long way to avoiding potential legal headaches in the future.

And of course, your New Media Evangelist is available to help with that process:-)

What about your company? How are members of your online communities handling other people’s content?

Photo Credit: Chief Trent

Tags: copyright eda eetimes netiquette

Here’s what we talked about:

Click here to go to the original video.

Tags: Ragan Communications Mark Ragan Ron Ploof New Media Evangelist ronamok online video interview