The horns of the “social media expert” dilemma
Skelliewag correctly observes that the concept of “social media expert” is silly in the first place.
Most people are looking for an expert to solve a very specific problem. Some examples from within social media:
- They want to learn how to create content that compels Digg users to vote, which will in turn bring them more pageviews and ad revenue.
- They want to use Twitter to build a bigger profile in their field.
- They want to create a blog that turns readers into customers.
Who are they going to hire, all things being equal?
- The expert in creating and marketing Diggable content for pageviews, or the ’social media expert’?
- The expert in creating super-accounts on Twitter, or the ’social media expert’?
- The expert in business blogging for conversions, or the ’social media expert’?
On the other hand, people with such narrow expertise are (in most cases properly) pigeon-holed as low-level tacticians. As I recently noted, social media should not be done in some kind of silo, let alone in a whole collection of silos.
Only the largest or most aggressive consumer marketing organizations will be able to afford and make proper use of the range of expertise Skelliewag suggests.
| Categories: Marketing communications, Marketing theory | 1 Comment |
Paul Gillin on influencer marketing
Paul Gillin offers a pair of posts that in my opinion are spot-on about influencer marketing. Highlights include: Read more
| Categories: Analyst relations, Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Technology marketing | 2 Comments |
Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong
There are tons of self-appointed “social media experts” out in cyberspace. There’s also a growing backlash against same, usually focusing around ideas such as:
- Many of these so-called “experts” greatly overstate their expertise.
- A lot of what passes for social media “success” just amounts to these “experts” getting attention from each other.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to argue with all that. 🙂 But I think there’s also a more fundamental reason why specialized social media “experts” should not be taken very seriously:
Social media done in a silo is social media done wrong. Read more
A great example of influencer outreach
From time to time I tell about a particularly bad job of doing influencer outreach at me. But I don’t directly balance those stories with examples of good outreach targeted at me. There are multiple reasons for this, including:
- My “How to pitch me” post was already arrogant enough. I don’t want to repeatedly conflate “This is how I like to be dealt with” and “This is how you should deal with analysts in general.”
- The nature of my business is such that, by the time I’m having a particularly good relationship with a company, there’s probably something confidential going on, or at least something I should be careful discussing in public.
As an alternative, I’d like to share a particularly good example of outreach I just discovered in the political sphere. Read more
| Categories: Barack Obama, Marketing communications, Political marketing | 25 Comments |
Restoring sanity to technology news embargoes
Technology news embargoes are a mess.
- Companies insist that news should be embargoed until press releases hit “the wire,” then don’t live up to their planned schedules as to when the releases will actually hit.
- Embargoes are commonly broken by bloggers working from home, online trade press working in non-US time zones, and the like.
- Companies are often maddeningly indecisive or vague as to what parts of a briefing are or aren’t embargoed.
Basically, a custom that worked fairly well in the age of heavily staffed weekly and monthly print media has not been adapted well to the up-to-the-minute, fragmented online age. Here’s what I propose to at least partially fix things. Read more
How to pitch me
Slightly edited June, 2010 to strike out passe’ parts.
In a good new trend, analysts are putting up explicit “How to pitch me” notes. (Carter Lusher has links to some of them.) Here’s mine. Read more
Know your audience
I just had one of the most ridiculous meetings I’ve had in a long time. A vendor about whom I and various other press/blog/analyst outlets had already written asked to meet with me. Three top executives schlepped out for a loooong dinner. Unbeknownst to me in advance, the company expected to hold the meeting under embargo. When I asked at the end of the meeting “So, what about that is embargoed”, they responded (in effect) “everything” — notwithstanding that they had received substantial coverage already, and that in 3 hours we hadn’t talked about any details of the sort that normally would be NDAed. No customer names, no product announcements, nothing. They just didn’t want coverage until their “launch date” 3 weeks hence.
Despite that investment of time in meeting with me, they’d obviously done little or nothing to prepare. Read more
Engagement marketing
More and more, consumer branding is about engagement. On the Internet, you’re most likely to see references to the social media aspects. But it goes further than blogs, chat, and diggery. For example, a huge fraction of the sports business now is apparel sales – replica jerseys and the like. This may be “tribal” in Seth Godin‘s lexicon, but it’s not particularly online-social.
US politics is heavily about engagement too. The traditional centers of engagement – unions, churches, and so on – have now been joined by the Internet as well. The Washington Post has a great article today about old-style engagement in the Clinton campaign.Micah Sifry makes the case that this time it’s different, and in the process describes the crucial role of internet-based engagement to this year’s presidential campaign.
And of course the same thing’s happening in software. Read more
| Categories: Marketing communications, Marketing theory, Political marketing, Technology marketing | 4 Comments |
Death to PowerPoints
I hate traditional PowerPoint presentations. Indeed, I usually flat-out refuse any briefing that involves sitting through a WebEx of PowerPoints. Instead, I insist that slides be emailed in advance. That way, I can see what the key points are, what I find most interesting, what I most want to challenge and drill down on, and so on. (Similarly, I rarely sit through entire sessions at conferences. If that be ADHD, make the most of it.)
Fellow analyst Seth Grimes’ recent post decrying PowerPoints confirmed that I am not alone. And come to think of it, Seth feels the same way I do about conferences; he complains when he’s the host and actually has to attend the sessions, because that gets in the way of conversations he’d evidently prefer. On the other hand, not all analysts agree with Seth and me. For example, it would seem that a couple of Forrester research analysts actually like structured pitches.
If nothing else, this is an illustration of my point that different (kinds of) influencers need to be communicated with differently.
Edit: Another analyst turns out to share my utter hatred for WebExed presentations.