This debate is one example of why I don’t buy into the idea that any “golden era” of tech blogging is coming to an end just because a bunch of media companies are changing hands and their employees are moving around a bit.

Because that’s what most of the “blogs” Jeremiah holds up as examples of the Golden Era – TechCrunch, Mashable, GigaOm, Gizmodo, etc. – haven’t been anything but media companies for a long, long while. Yes they are blogs by most technical definitions – they use blog software, allow comments, publish an RSS feed, post in reverse chronological order, etc. – but I think for these ad- and scoop-driven behemoths of the tech media “blog” vs “media” ceased being a useful or realistic distinction several years ago.

Look at the top 3 categories of Jeremiah’s proposed taxonomy:

The most notable common elements? Ad-driven business models, editorial that relies on the time-tested mix of scoops, reviews, and opinion, and paid (some more so than others) professional writers and editors sharing the workload. Every one of them is, first and foremost, a media company. The Verge is a classic startup, whereas TechCrunch and ReadWriteWeb are startups who made successful exits. They just so happen to publish in blog format.

I’m making this somewhat nitpicky argument as I think the true “golden era” of tech blogging has never been driven by these aspiring media companies, but rather by the groups of blogs farther down Jeremiah’s taxonomy – emerging and individual bloggers. It’s their hyper-opinionated voices, wildly varied posting styles, and sheer style and creativity that have always struck me as the truly interesting and passionate side of tech blogging, and if anything their opportunities to be heard are accelerating as short-format social media (Google+, Twitter) exponentially increases the reach and impact of the great content they create.

(Incidentally I consider Jeremiah’s own great blog as part of his “Career Individual Bloggers” category, and is an excellent example of the kind of tech blog I’m referring to above)

TechCrunch was wildly more entertaining, and endless source of gold you might say, when it was basically just “Mike’s blog” – and became significantly less so when it hired a CEO and a fleet of writers, no matter how opinionated they might have been. When Mashable was Pete and a couple others digging into social media, and not a 60+ person group covering the broader tech lifestyle, it was a must read for those in the industry. Now it’s something with occasional gold nuggets, too often hidden in an avalanche of press releases and guest posts.

I don’t begrudge companies like that their success at all, but I bring them up to make the point that for me at least, the “golden era” of tech blogging has always been less defined by a timeframe and more by a type of blogger. The real gold in tech blogging is now, and has always been, driven by the small guys who are less concerned about traffic volume and ad revenue and more about starting amazing debates and conversations – like the one Jeremiah managed to kick off with a heck of a headline.

Related posts:

1. Is blogging making a comeback with the Millennials?
2. The real power of Promoted Tweets

That’s the gist of a presentation I gave to a couple student classes and groups at Elon University in Burlington, North Carolina two weeks ago. A short version is available on Slideshare, and is embedded immediately below.

The basic idea behind the collision is this: as the media world radically shifts thanks to the rise in digital and in particular the emergence of social media as a consumer-driven force, smart marketers are starting to shift their budgets to align with the new reality. Agencies of all stripes – from advertising and creative to PR, Media, Digital, DM and on – are in turn chasing those dollars.

As a result we find PR agencies with fully baked in-house digital shops, and formerly TV-heavy ad agencies with more full-time social media strategists than the largest digital group. We find a surge in acquisitions of speciality social media agencies, who find themselves by foresight or happy accident sitting square in the most lucrative sweet spot.

From a client-side marketer’s perspective, things are both wildly confusing – “why is my PR agency pitching their HTML5 expertise again?” – and loaded with choice, variety, and cost pressures working in their favor. They might put out an RFP for a social media campaign, and wind up with a final pitch group consisting of a niche social agency, a full-service (and large) digital agency, and a global PR agency’s digital group squaring off against their own current advertising agency-of-record.

What’s stressful for the agency new biz guys is heaven for the clients.

All this is radically reshaping the agency world, as traditional lines between agency specialities are blurring. For smart, digitally- and socially-savvy aspiring employees like those I met with at Elon, the opportunities this chaos creates are endless. The market for their skills has grown dramatically, and no longer are they locked into traditional career paths (“oh, she’s an ad creative”).

Their expertise, as it grows, has the potential to be attractive to every type of agency that’s chasing those digital and social client budgets. Which is to say, every agency that intends to survive past the next 5 years or so.

The next 12-24 months in my view will see this collision in the digital and social center accelerate, amplifying both the confusion and opportunity I mentioned above. Should be fun.

Related posts:

1. Why no single type of agency will own social media
2. Two agency websites that will get you thinking
3. Liking is the Scourge of the Agency New Business Lead

As long-overdue as this feature is, and as much hype as it is getting, it’s a follower acquisition tactic and just a step along the way to the real goal of getting people to opt-in to your content stream. Just like with Facebook spotlight tabs, beyond the first-visit experience by a non-fan/follower the Twitter brand page itself has limited utility. The real value, as I stated a few months ago, is in the content stream. That’s where the engagement happens, where the social spread of your ideas and content occurs, and where the ultimate ROI – measured however you prefer – will be realized.

Let’s go back to Facebook for a moment. We know from experience that the majority of traffic to most brand Facebook brand pages tends to cluster in two places – the Wall, where current fans land, and the default landing (or “spotlight”) tab, where non-fans land. One is a home for engagement and interaction, the other serves to quickly grab a visitor’s attention and entice them to become a fan and opt-in to all that wonderful engagement.

As designed, Twitter’s new brand pages are roughly equivalent to a mashup of the Facebook Wall + landing tab, limited to non-followers. For current followers, chances are they will never see the shiny new brand page, just like fans of a brand on Facebook will likely never glimpse the often-amazing landing tabs (or any of a brand’s tabs, really). Follower attention, rightly, will be focused on the content stream and the engagement it inspires, which they will most likely be consuming through 3rd-party apps and sites accessing the Twitter API.

Helping expose that content stream, in ways that add tremendous value to other types of brand content (blog posts, web pages, etc.), is why I’m so excited about Twitter’s other big announcement around Embedded Tweets, but that’s for another post.

Twitter Brand Pages Are All About Acquisition, Not Engagement – tinyurl.com/74644rs #in #fb

— Kevin Briody (@kevinbriody) December 14, 2011

The long-term value of social media is in the engagement centered on the content stream, whether it lives through your Facebook updates, blog posts, videos, or Tweets. The majority of your focus should be around making that stream as rich (in terms of great content) and rewarding (in terms of great interaction and discussion) as possible. To get people to opt-in to that stream is of course critical, and that’s the role Twitter Brand Pages – just like Facebook landing tabs – will play: follower acquisition.

With all the buzz and focus around these new pages, and the many beautiful or innovative designs I’m sure we’ll see in the coming weeks and months, just keep that in mind. Twitter brand pages are follower acquisition tools, and are not destinations for existing followers to find anything of much value. For established brands on Twitter, are focused on engagement with their already large/mature follower bases, the brand page is less of a necessity.

Related posts:

1. Twitter brand pages? The value is in the stream
2. Twitter is Not Your RSS Feed – Stop Treating it Like One
3. The real power of Promoted Tweets

As a presenter, there are a number of ways you can quickly find yourself at the wheel of a train wreck, from technical problems to a combative or skeptical audience. A presentation can wreck quickly, such as when you realize you brought the wrong slides or the audio goes completely dead, or in agonizing slow motion such as when you come to the dreaded realization that the content or your presentation style is going over with the audience like a ton of lead.

Regardless of why or how, your job as the presenter is to grab the wheel and will the train back on the tracks. You owe it to the people who took time out of their day to give you the privilege of their attention to make it work.

Which is exactly what I did not do in one particular presentation. My particular train wreck involved having prepared content that ended up being a complete mismatch with the interests and background of the audience. That become glaringly evident right from the start, but rather than toss the deck and adapt on the fly, I forged ahead in the hope that somewhere in the slides I’d find some common ground with the group arrayed in front of me.

The end result was a disinterested audience who asked just a couple of cursory questions at the end. While I hope they took away something positive – some insights or understandings they didn’t have before – I doubt many walked out eagerly waiting to hear when and where I might be speaking next.

The kicker is I because the mismatch was clear early on – I asked some hand-raiser questions like usual at the outset to gauge their skills and interests – I had an opportunity to toss the deck and just talk to their interests. To do that takes both some guts and a load of confidence, and while I feel pretty good about where I stand on both fronts, I still didn’t take that plunge.

What lessons did I learn that I’ll take into every presentation from now on?

• Do your audience homework: This is where my presentation initially failed. I thought I had done the homework, but a combination of errors led me to prepare to speak to an audience that looked very little like the one I found sitting in front of me. Be crystal clear with the conference organizers on the background of those attending. Get a list in advance with names, companies, and job titles at the least. See if you can do a pre-conference informal survey on Twitter, through the organizer’s blog or e-newsletter, etc. Understand the context surrounding your presentation – is it part of a larger conference? What’s the focus? Who else is presenting, and is there any overlap with your proposed content?
• Ask the audience questions up front: Before you launch into your opening story, pause and ask a few questions to validate the results of your homework. Find out who they are, what they do, how familiar they already are with your subject, and gauge what they might want to hear or learn in the time allotted. After all it’s better to know up front, than a week later in a horrible post-event survey. In my case, I actually did ask these questions, but the results surprised me to such an extent that they threw me off and I failed to properly react.
• Most critically – Be willing the dump the deck, and always have a backup plan: What if you find yourself in my situation, where you quickly discover that the presentation you’re ready to give is not at all what the audience is interested in hearing? Have a plan – or at least a broad sense of some options – for what you would do. Can you cherry pick a subset of slides that would make for an interesting – if different than planned – presentation? Have you mentally prepped which slides you might pick? If not, do you have the knowledge and confidence to go completely off-script and have an engaging, no-slide talk with the audience?

By all means rock your slides (I highly recommend reading Garr Reynolds’ blog and books), but the most beautiful and informative slides in the world are useless if they don’t convey information the audience is interested in hearing.

Obviously do your audience homework in advance, which is pretty much standard advice for presenting to a group of any size. But if you find yourself in my situation, where your audience still isn’t the one you were expecting, get ready to do toss the script out the window, be flexible, and focus on creating an interesting and positive experience for everyone in the room. Do everything you can to keep that presentation train on the rails.

No related posts.

A bit of news on the personal front: Today is my last day as Director of Strategic Innovation with Ignite Social Media. As of next Tuesday, November 1st, I’ll be joining the team at Pace Communications (@PaceComm) as Director of Digital Strategy.

Working at Ignite for the past two years has been incredible, both in terms of the daily experience and the insane growth and change the agency has gone through – such as growing 4x in staff count and picking up ridiculously cool clients like Samsung, Microsoft and Chrysler, among many others. I have no doubt that their already impressive client list will become even more enviable as time goes on.

I also had the privilege of working with insanely smart and funny people and getting a crash course on how social media marketing for large brands is *supposed* to work. Throw in all the behind-the-scenes stuff that truly makes Ignite Ignite - like Mystery Trips (Jamaica anyone?), Nerf wars, sarcastic Yammer threads, pups in the office, out-of-context quotes, inspirational and occasionally disturbing brainstorms – and it all adds up to not so much a job as a slightly crazy and very inspirational home away from home.

All of it has been wonderful, and all of it will be missed.

Sometimes however a great opportunity pops up that you just can’t pass by, and that’s the case with Pace. It’s a combination of the right team, role, timing and circumstances that’s making this move happen, and I can’t tell you how excited I am to get started.

Content drives conversation, offline as well as on, and as a content marketing agency Pace is in a unique spot to help companies spark and nurture conversations around their brands, products, experiences, and communities. I get to help drive and shape those efforts across both digital and social – all in all, it’s a pretty cool challenge.

As a bonus, Pace is located just a few minutes from my house, shrinking my daily roundtrip commute from nearly 3 hours to less than 20 minutes. My wonderful, and very patient, wife and kids will get to see a whole lot more of me in the near future (ready or not!).

I’ll share more here and on Twitter (@kevinbriody) as I settle in. Thanks again to everyone at Ignite, and to my future colleague at Pace I’ll see you next week!

Photo by delphwynd via Flickr an CC License

Related posts:

1. Carnival, Royal Caribbean, and NCL: A Social Media Comparison [Ignite Post]
2. Social Media ROI Revisited: 4 Ways to Measure [Ignite Post]

I’m not revisiting those here. Rather, this post is about two arguments I’m still seeing pop up time and again from speakers, marketers, columnists, and strategists alike. Arguments that will get you exactly nowhere when it comes time to fight for, and justify, your social media budget.

What are they?

• The Opportunity Cost Argument aka “What’s the ROI for social media? Well, what’s the ROI on picking up the phone? What’s the ROI on your secretary?” This line of reasoning uses fear to scare managers into investing in social media efforts, in effect saying that your customer expect it, and if you’re not active, not listening or engaging, there is a risk for huge customer dissatisfaction.
• The Aspirational Argument aka “Those who really know social media aren’t talking about ROI.” This relies variously on the appeal of the shiny and new mixed with the fear of being left behind as a company or professional.

Don’t get me wrong, buried in both arguments are grains of truth and worthy sentiments, particularly around opportunity cost. Depending on your industry, yes, your customers might be very active on social media and your lack of monitoring and engagement could result in both lost opportunities or worse, a disconnect with the needs and interests of your customers.

But acknowledging that doesn’t excuse you from taking steps to quantify what kind of ROI you could reasonable expect for taking the social media plunge – whether it’s a concrete metric like new sales generated or a more indirect, proxy ROI metric like higher customer satisfaction. Your job as a business professional is in part to understand what your company stands to get for money you propose investing – relying on fear and generalities unsupported by numbers is just not going to cut it.

I have less sympathy for the aspirational argument, which seems to be flung around by people who have never run a serious budget, are making their living on the speaking circuit where you aren’t generally accountable for actual results, or simply can’t be bothered to do the hard math. Supporters of this argument fall back on the “cool kids” line of thinking, making others feel dumb or like anti-social luddites just for daring to ask smart business questions.

Social media is rapidly maturing as an element in the marketing and communications mix, and just like the other elements – email, direct mail, TV, PR, digital, etc. – it is reasonable and necessary to try to calculate what you get out of the resources invested.

Don’t make the mistake of falling back on either of these two arguments if you expect to get your next social media initiative funded in the real world.

Related posts:

1. Social Media ROI Revisited: Series
2. SAS take on Social Media Analytics

Unfortunately, there are also many examples of how to do it wrong – some well-intentioned if misguided or misinterpreted, and some just flat-out boneheaded or exploitative. It’s in the latter group that Kenneth Cole’s Where Do You Stand campaign sits.

Apparently Kenneth Cole has decided to double down on exploitation of controversial issues. You may recall just in February 2011 the now infamous tweet that so genuinely supported the rising Arab Spring playing out on the streets of Eqypt by…promoting their new spring clothes lineup:

“Millions are in uproar in #Cairo. Rumor is they heard our new spring collection is now available online at http://bit.ly/KCairo – KC” (ed: the “KC” being a shorthand way to attribute the tweet to CEO and namesake Kenneth Cole directly)

As mentioned above, I think cause marketing can be a very effective marketing tactic and one that can be positively received by all sides. However what Kenneth Cole is attempting to do with Where Do You Stand crosses the line from genuine support for a cause into outright hijacking of controversial topics and debate in order to push their completely unrelated product line.

If you haven’t seen it, the campaign poses a range of questions around guns, abortions, gay rights, and war, such as “Are anti-war protests unpatriotic?” and “Should the government have the right to choose?” For each question Cole encourages you to vote yes or no via a Facebook Like button, which helpfully pushes the Kenneth Cole brand and campaign into your Facebook News Feed. It also pulls in a range of Facebook comments and Tweets. While the Facebook comments at least seem to be specific to the Kenneth Cole campaign, the Tweets appear to be a curated list from across the Twitter landscape.

From a technical perspective, it’s not a bad implementation. It’s on moral grounds that this campaign falls apart.

Kenneth Cole is not tying this site or campaign to any charity or broader organizing effort, and any argument that it’s all about raising awareness is undercut, in my view, by the ridiculously blatant and inappropriate ties between emotionally charged statements and Cole’s latest fashion looks. There are no next steps, no guidance on how you can take action, no opportunity to give, no tips on how to make your voice heard. There are just classless promotional items such as the cheesy and useless marketing phrases like “Wear Not War!” on the ridiculous models in the downloadable wallpaper (one of several) below:

So soldiers and civilians are dying by the thousands on distant battlefields, and rather than providing support for worthy organizations on any side of the debate, Kenneth Cole feels their contribution as a company should be to leech off emotion, pain, and suffering by showing off models and providing “helpful” links to a portion of the site called “What You Stand In” where you can pick your fashion looks from among Cole’s selection.

I was trying to end this post on a positive note by coming up with suggestions on how I would fix this campaign – criticism should be constructive wherever possible – but I don’t think that’s possible in this case. This campaign is just too ill-conceived and too far gone. Kenneth Cole should pull this down, lay off Twitter for a while, and take a few weeks or months for a serious gut check of the morals underpinning their marketing practices.

This one should go in the Cause Marketing Hall of Shame.

Related posts:

1. Ken Courts Barbie Online – A Great Social Media Marketing Example
2. Twitter brand pages? The value is in the stream

This is a post for the beleaguered corporate marketer, who by virtue of talent, vision, policy, or just (possibly bad) luck, sits as the gatekeeper in the organization who gets to decide which brands, sub-brands, teams, or products get to have an official presence in social media.

First off, every organization should have this role, whether it’s vested in one person or, more typically, a virtual team or committee. The alternative is often chaos, where a brand’s social media presence ends up fragmented across tens or dozens of Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, many of them ignored or abandoned.

That’s not hyperbole – I’ve seen it in many clients, and it happens far more often than you might think and even among companies viewed as fairly mature and competent when it comes to social. Brands get that way either by lacking a gatekeeper role, or the when gatekeeper doesn’t ask the right questions of those who want their very own shiny Facebook page.

The following six questions are a starting point to help corporate marketers filter, and are based on a set of recommendations I’ve discussed with numerous clients. The “they” refers to the team asking for their own social channels, distinct from the existing official higher-level corporate accounts:

1. Is their brand sufficiently distinct from the overall corporate brand identity?

Mountain Dew is part of Pepsi, but the brand is completely distinct. Diet Pepsi is much more of an edge case. Is the brand in question just a subset of the primary corporate brand, or something – in the customer’s eyes – completely different?

2. Do they have a unique target audience that differs markedly from the parent brand?

If the target audience/demographic is largely the same as the parent brand, then the case for creating a new set of social accounts becomes less strong. There are likely other ways to get that brand involved in social – a Facebook tab, or some percentage mix of the recurring content updates on the primary accounts, for example.

3. Do they have a unique and compelling fan value proposition?

In short, can they answer in a single, clear sentence “Why should I follow XYZ service on Facebook? What’s in it for me?” If not, and the answer is either vague or simply “because people expect to see us on Facebook” then no, they shouldn’t get their own official social accounts.

4. Do they have staff or agency resources to build and maintain the channel over the long-term?

Someone has to build the tabs, the logos, the backgrounds; someone has to craft and post updates or tweets; most critically someone has to monitor and moderate (if applicable) the conversation taking place around each social channel, and actively engage with the community. Do they have the resources available and committed?

5. Do they have a content plan sufficient for at least 3-6 months?

The fastest way to end up with abandoned social accounts is to launch them without a clear, consistent plan for creating and posting content (posts, tweets, etc.). Ask anyone who’s managed a company Facebook page, blog, or Twitter account – coming up with good content, day after day, week after week, is damn hard. If they don’t have a plan, either they’re not taking the challenge seriously or they don’t know what they’re getting in to.

6. Do they have a plan and resources for promoting the accounts through other marketing channels?

Build it, and they will come is not an acceptable social media marketing strategy. The team asking you for their own unique Twitter account, YouTube channel, Facebook page etc. must have a solid marketing plan for how they will drive awareness of and traffic to those brand new channels. Otherwise in all likelihood they’ll end up twisting in the wind, and eventually abandoned as they team realizes they’re not seeing any value in them.

These are simply a starting point, an initial set of questions to ask internal teams both to identify those with a real and justifiable need (and the resources and commitment to back it up), and to get those who lack that thinking in the right direction.

What other questions should be asked?

No related posts.

Last week in AdAge’s Small Agency Diary, Greg Straface of PJA Advertising penned a few words of warning on the topic that I thought were worth expanding on:

Social media has been invaluable for zeroing in on client prospects. But be careful. The same social activity that gets you in the door or gives you pitch-worthy insights could be giving inside information to your competitors.

From personal experience, you’d be amazed at how often this sort of thing happens. It’s a small industry, and after you run a few new business pitches you quickly get a feel for who your primary competitors are. Spend any amount of time on Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn, or Facebook and you’ll see many of them openly checking-in at the same company you just walked out of an RFP pitch with, or tweeting about how they just landed at the nearby airport in time for “a big meeting.”

Greg mentions some of the most common practices: connecting with your prospective clients via LinkedIn before the pitch is done, checking in at the client site, and so on.

By far though, the most insiduous inadvertent competitive research tool is the Facebook Like button. When you’re pitching digital or social to clients, of course you’re going to check out their Facebook presence and those of key competitors or peers, and more often than not the good content or porgramming is parked behind a fan-gate. It’s all too easy to get in the lazy habit of hitting those like buttons continually, without considering just how ridiculously well that activity can telegraph who and what you’re checking out in a business context.

Being too liberal with Likes in the name of research also has the often amusing byproduct of truly messing up your social profile in ways that render your data useless for ad targeters, and occasionally prompts some strange reactions from your friends (“Umm, why did you just like a lingerie brand, kids TV show, cruise line, and imported beer in a 5 minute stretch? What do you DO all day where you work?”).

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t Spy vs. Spy stuff, and even if you know another specific agency is part of an RFP there’s only so much you can (typically) do with that knowledge. But it is a ruthless business, so pay a bit more attention to your use of all those Like buttons, LinkedIn connections, geo-tagged tweets, and Places checkins – after all, your competitors likely are.

No related posts.

If you’re a business – small or large, consumer or B2B – the only advice you should be listening to right now about how to engage on Google+ is just that: relax.

Despite the fact that it’s from Google, it’s still a new social network, completely unproven, with no formal support yet for brands or business of any stripe.

Despite the fantastic growth curve, launching past 18 million estimated users this week, it’s a fair bit away from “crossing the chasm” to mass market adoption. About the only audiences present in volume are the marketers, engineers, social media types, and small content providers/web entrepreneurs.

In short, as of now Google+ is largely populated by people who are frantically looking for ways for make money off it, for themselves or their clients, or the general tech early adopter community. If those are your target audiences, by all means, dive in and do your worst. Otherwise, your audience likely isn’t there just yet.

Will they be? Possibly. It remains to be seen if Google+’s unique features, such as Circles and Hangouts, are compelling enough for the general public to break their Facebook addiction. It also remains to be seen just what Google+ support for business will look like, a disclosure that is rumored to be coming anytime from this week to 2+ months from now.

It certainly doesn’t hurt to jump in as an individual and play around with Google+. If you have time, great. But as of right now there are too many unknowns, and a lack of audience, to justify diverting resources from the marketing channels that are making you money or delivering on key metrics right now.

There are big brands itching to get in and start playing, but for the most part that desire is likely driven by either a specific desire to position the brand as innovative, a goal of reach those tech early adopters, or simply by highly motivated brand marketers looking to make a splash. If any of that describes you or your motives, fantastic.

Otherwise?

Relax.

Watch and learn from other’s mistakes, play around with the network if you have time, and be ready to jump in *only* if or when Google+ demonstrates it has both staying power and appeal to your specific customer audience.

UPDATE: It seems you’ll have to wait a bit longer than expected, perhaps “months” now per Google’s product manager.

Related posts:

1. What makes Google+ so appealing (for now)? A clean slate