A version of this blog post appeared on Mashable on May 8, 2012.
Why do search engines always rank certain websites so highly? Obviously, their content is kingly, but so is their search engine optimization (SEO). Indeed, for many sites, the search-engine spiders that crawl the Web deliver a third or more of their traffic. Perhaps the most famous example comes from the Huffington Post, which in February reeled in readers with the ingenious bait: “What Time Is the Super Bowl?”
In other words, algorithms don’t appreciate wit, irony, humor, or style. As reporter Steve Lohr put it, they’re “numbingly literal-minded.” Alas, Oscar Wilde!
These laments ring true in a big way: it is one of the definitive 21st century truisms that in addition to writing for eternity, or for one’s mother, today’s writer must also write for Google. Yet, as always, the devil’s in the metadata. The secret of stellar SEO is that you can have your cake and eat it, too; that is, you can pen pun-based headlines all day long and maintain your journalistic integrity. You just need to draft a second headline that’s straightforward and keywordy.
The difference is between an article title, which is what you show your readers, and a page title, which is what you show search engines. In technical terms, it is the H1 tag vs. the title tag. (With a good plug-in, like Page Title for Drupal or WordPress SEO for WordPress, you can rig most content management systems to separate the two.)
Consider a few examples from leading news organizations. As they do with most things in life, the media have adopted tactics that range from the bad to the good to the best.
A milestone was reached in 2010, when Google made a major announcement not by press release but by blog post. Five years earlier, a company of Google’s stature would have issued a boilerplate statement on a newswire. Now, a Google executive was crafting a more thoughtful, even heartfelt narrative that was published on the Official Google Blog.
This shift in medium and message represented a new era in corporate communications. No longer does a traditional press release suffice to make news. News now needs to be conveyed in an empathetic tone and delivered in a user-friendly format.
Google isn’t the only exemplar of this strategy. Using a conversational voice, Dell breaks news on its blog. When Netflix has something to say, it complements its release with a first-person post. Southwest Airlines takes the prize for a blog that whips CNN-type announcements into HBO-likecelebrations.
But what about businesses outside the Fortune 500 and Silicon Valley elites, which don’t have deep resources and a vast, engaged audience at the ready? How are they keeping pace with the changing nature of news distribution?
The same way the big boys are—and often as effectively. A variety of you-wouldn’t-think-so companies are making creative use of blogs as a vehicle for public relations. Here are four examples.
A version of this blog post appeared on the Future Buzz on January 17, 2012.
Chris Abraham recently published a case study on the “art of writing the perfect blogger pitch.” There’s a lot to like here. For one, the time and thought Chris and his team devote to this esoterica are rare. For another, spilling your trade secrets takes guts.
And yet, for a purportedly “perfect” pitch, the Abraham Harrison technique, approach, and diction leave much to be desired. Here’s why (in web-friendly fashion, via a list with headings).
1. Spam. In a classic act of burying the lead, Chris notes, “We reach out cold to upwards of 5,000 bloggers at a time.” This is perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Chris’s technique. After all, anyone can subscribe to a database such as Vocus or Cision, select key audiences and areas, compile a media list, and blast out a pitch. Industry insiders call this the “spray and pray” technique. Others know it as a form letter. The bottom line: it’s spam.
By contrast, another technique is to craft individual messages to specific bloggers. Take it away, Lisa Barone:“You know you’re sending the same e-mail to 20 people. I know you’re sending the same e-mail to 20 people. But sometimes you gotta fake it to make me feel special and pretty … Woo me … Talk about how you grew up in the same hometown (only if you really did). Comment on a post I wrote that gave you a bad case of the giggles, or how you think my Twitter feed should come with an NC-17 rating … I’ll be a lot more receptive once you’ve” connected with me personally.
2. WITFM. The best PR makes it appear as if you’re doing a favor for the person you’re pitching, letting him in on something important and intriguing. By contrast, Chris makes it clear that he’s the one requesting a favor: “If you are able to post about this issue in any form, it would really help spread the message of homelessness in its many diverse forms and maybe suggest ways to help improve many lives.”
Leave the guilt trips for Willy Loman. Instead, demonstrate the WITFM—“what’s in it for me?” To wit, don’t tell me why homelessness matters; tell me why my readers will care about it.
3. Subject line. Everyone agrees that your subject line is critical, so it’s surprising that Chris’s—“November Is National Homelessness Month”—is so boring. (As a colleague puts it, “It’s about as ‘perfect’ as an event notice whose headline reads, ‘Mark Your Calendars.’”)
To be sure, Chris seems to think this is a virtue; he explains, “We want [our subject lines] to be as neutral and as informational as possible. Teasing or tricking a blogger into opening [the e-mail] by being cute, mysterious, or clever … has almost always blown up in our faces.”
This is myopic: you need not sacrifice cleverness to be straightforward. While “Help Feed Homeless Children!” may be exploitative, a line like “What Are You Doing for National Homelessness Month?” is catchy without being too cute.
4. Intro. Chris refers to his opening paragraph as “poetry,” labored over by a team of three. But again, his copy is a snooze-fest:
“November is National Homelessness Month and I’m reaching out to you to discuss the issue of homelessness in America. I’m also hoping that you’ll discuss this issue with the readers of <<Blog Name>>. I am a volunteer at a small kitchen for the homeless in DC and while working there it occurred to me that this issue affects every town, village, and city in America.
This is the best a powerhouse like Abraham Harrison can do? Sure, it’s clear, but it’s nothing special, and it’s hardly inspiring. Indeed, not only does it lack cadence and cohesion; it also lacks commas.
5. Astroturfing. For each campaign, Chris creates a new e-mail address with its own domain. In this case, he’s using cjabraham@MiriamsKitchenNews.org, which is separate from the “real” Miriam’s Kitchen domain, MiriamsKitchen.org. This is problematic for various reasons.
a. Let’s give Chris the benefit of the doubt and assume that “bloggers don’t trust PR firms.” This is why his signature says “on behalf of Miriam’s Kitchen,” rather than Abraham Harrison. Yet there’s no getting around the fact that masking your employer is deceptive.
By contrast, consider the total-transparency approach taken by New Media Strategies: when its employees do something as simple as retweet something from a client, they’re required to use the hash tag “#client.” Ultimately, shying away from full disclosure only gives the PR industry a bad rep.
b. Given a limited budget and limited time, creating and managing a new e-mail address domain is a poor allocation of resources.
c. In this case, Abraham Harrison created an entire microsite at http://MiriamsKitchenNews.org. But, again, most campaigns can’t afford this expenditure, so what happens then? Do you leave MiriamsKitchenNews.org empty? Do you redirect it to your own firm’s site? Do you throw up a simple landing page that repurposes your pitch e-mail?
d. What happens if, six months from now, someone you contacted replies? (We’ve all received one of these e-mails.) If you’re not still checking cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org, does the sender get a bounce-back or an auto-reply? Or nothing? If you are still checking cjabraham@miriamskitchennews.org, given that you’re creating a new address for each campaign, I envy your endurance in monitoring what must be dozens of addresses. And to complicate matters further, what do you do with these addresses when your contract with the given client expires?
6. URLs. Chris deliberately omits the “http://” prefix in links; he says that e-mail clients will auto-activate incomplete URLs. While Gmail is sophisticated enough to do this, many other e-mail clients are not. This inability is especially damaging when a message arrives in plain text, which is the only form Chris sends.
Not many people will gladly share 3,000 words on the subject of e-mail communications. For that, Chris deserves gratitude and respect.
He also offers important insights, especially the one that a good pitch will spark a conversation. In that spirit, he’s agreed to respond to my critique.
So, Chris, over to you. How can two pros who’ve been working with bloggers for so long reach such divergent conclusion?
Enjoy this post? There’s more where this came from on Twitter, where I challenge sacred cows 140 characters at a time @jrick.
A version of this blog post appeared on Brazen Life on October 24, 2011.
“The dog ate my homework.”
Even though this famous excuse is rarely used, what it symbolizes is all-too-familiar: an aversion to admit accountability. What’s more, this urge to excuse one’s blunders rather than shoulder them betrays a bigger issue: a lack of character.
Let’s be honest: no wants to entertain excuses—even perfectly good ones. We value friends who are reliable, we promote employees who are consistent, we love spouses because when they wrong us, they rectify it. Not for nothing did the sign on Harry Truman’s desk proclaim, “The buck stops here!”
To be sure, emergencies arise. We all screw up from time to time. Yet it’s how you rectify things that counts, that makes you who you are.
For example, did your car break down? Do what my realtor did when this happened to him while house-hunting with a client: call a cab. “The show must go on,” Morgan explained. No excuses.
How about this well-worn crutch? “I was stuck in traffic… And parking was even worse.” Anyone who’s ever sat behind a steering wheel has bumped into these predicaments. That you didn’t prepare for them indicates a preference to make others wait rather than make yourself early. No excuses.
Here’s my favorite refrain: “I’ve been busy.” Nope. We make time for what’s important to us. Why not just say you dropped the ball and apologize? And then make up for it. No excuses.
This no-excuses lifestyle is demanding. It means if you say you’ll do something, don’t make your counterpart follow-up for an ETA. If you agree to call someone at a certain time, don’t make her wait. If a request is ambiguous, don’t foist the monkey back, but assume the burden and propose clarifications.
If you’re nodding, you’ll be gratified to know you’re in good company. At Apple, whenever an executive reached the level of vice president, Steve Jobs would deliver a short sermon. Jobs imagined that the garbage in his office wasn’t being emptied, and when he asked the janitor why, the janitor shrugged. The locks were changed, and the janitor didn’t have a key.
This is understandable coming from someone who empties trash bins for a living. As Jobs put it, “When you’re the janitor, reasons matter.” But when you’re a VP, he continued, “reasons stop mattering.”
What matters, I would add, are commitments.
This Rubicon separates the shoulder-shrugger from the commitment-keeper—the staffer from the manager, the manager from the VP, the VP from the C suite. To the commitment-keeper, it doesn’t matter who or what’s at fault; an excuse signifies a personal failure. To the commitment-keeper, nothing is more than important than keeping your word, and thus your integrity.
Think of this next time you next you find yourself in a hole. Will you dig out with an alibi or with accountability? The choice is yours.
A version of this blog post appeared on Mashable on October 14, 2011.
The next big thing is always around the click
Internet innovation is so fierce and constant that it undermines the notion of zero-sum market share. Instead of vying for a piece of the same fixed and static pie, webtrepreneurs bake whole new pies. Not for nothing does Jeff Bezos insist that the Kindle comprises a “different product category” than the iPad: just because a company maintains a seeming monopoly on a market doesn’t mean the market is devoid of opportunities. When there’s an innovator, there’s a way. With the Web, Goliath is always vulnerable.
We should be especially skeptical because Internet innovation comes in tidal waves: big and bold. By contrast, when’s the last time your microwave got a radical upgrade? Or your shower head? And how’s that electric car coming along?
Yet roundtables never took off as a form of outreach. That’s too bad, because as a vehicle to engage many stakeholders at once, roundtables can be as effective, if not more so, than their headline-grabbing cousins, Twitter and Facebook.
What is a bloggers’ roundtable? Technically, it’s a conference call. Figuratively, it’s a virtual press conference or editorial board meeting. Instead of standing at a podium, the speakers sit by a speakerphone, while the audience—the bloggers—dial into a conference line.
When is a bloggers’ roundtable useful? A roundtable works best when you want to share your story with a small, engaged group; when you want thoughtful feedback; and when you want substantive write-ups. (“Small” can range from a car-full of people to a dinner party to an NFL team.) The conversation is more intimate than a live chat, the invitation is more prestigious than a tweet or Facebook update, and the whole thing is more fun than an e-mail.
What do you need to do? After compiling a media list of pertinent bloggers, send each one an invitation to this “exciting new program.” Just as you wouldn’t invite the guy off the street to your press conference, so it’s best to review each blogger’s work beforehand to ensure that he’s relevant and respectable. (To be sure, this often is a judgment call: What do you do with someone, like a Keith Olbermann or a Glenn Beck, who’s very controversial but who commands a huge audience?)
Given the unwritten rule of RSVPs—of those who are invited, a minority will agree to come; of those who agree to come, a minority will actually show—it’s best to invite at least twice as many people as you’d like to participate.
Once you develop a distro list, you’ll need to set up a conference line. If you have the budget, consider recording and/or transcribing the call, so that you later can publish the audio file and transcript. Not only will this win you plaudits for transparency. It’ll also produce continuing returns on investment.
Now you’re ready to start inviting people. A few best practices:
Send a calendar invite instead of or in addition to an e-mail.
Send the invite a week in advance, and dispatch a reminder the day before.
Instead of trying to cram everything into the invite, use links. Avoid attachments.
Mention that the number of spots is limited. This engenders scarcity and thus commitment once someone has RSVPed.
If you sense that a blogger is especially receptive, ask if there are others whom he’d recommend that you invite.
If you have the time, treat your most receptive blogger to an exclusive: A heads-up that you’re launching the roundtable, a pertinent article before it’s published, an advance one-on-one interview with your subject matter expert(s). Then, in your invitation, you can link to what the blogger wrote, which bolsters your credibility and inspires others to follow suit.
If you have even more time, consider conducting media training or murder boards with your expert(s).
How does it work? Generally, a roundtable lasts for an hour. After taking roll call, the host, who is typically the organization’s spokesman, introduces the experts and lays out the guidelines. Sample guidelines:
Everything’s on the record.
Use mute when you’re not talking.
State your name and the name of your blog before speaking.
Each expert then provides a brief overview of the subject and his role in it. Then comes the crux of the roundtable—the Q&A.
On one hand, you can control the colloquy by calling on each blogger in the order everyone dialed in. On the other hand, you can let the conversation ebb and flow of its own accord. Or you can pursue a middle ground, which avoids awkward silences and doesn’t put anyone on the spot, by asking each participant to press the pound sign for his phone to be unmuted, after which he’s placed in a queue.
Whichever approach you prefer, while structure is important, don’t straight-jacket the conversation. Cultivate it. Your goal is a fruitful give-and-take.
For brownie points, consider preparing a backgrounder on each blogger, which your representatives can use to great effect when responding: “Hi Peter – Before I answer, let me just say how much I empathized with your recent tweet on the misery of being a Redsox fan.”
How do you judge success? Success comes when the bloggers write about what they heard. When this happens, encourage your expert(s) or spokesman to do something to show support, like leaving a comment on the post or tweeting about it; public displays of affection go a long way on the Web.
The bottom line: There’s more to online outreach than “Twitbook.” Sometimes the best tool is the oldest: The telephone.
What’s your experience with the bloggers’ roundtable? What advice would you add?
A version of this blog post appeared on Mashable on August 29, 2011.
How to sell social media
In business, definitions are everywhere. They’re your first line of defense in mission statements, job descriptions, expense accounts, statements of work, accounting principles, and the like. If you can’t define something, you’re left with Potter Stewart’s famous but ultimately unhelpful maxim, “I know it when I see it.”
Understandably, this is why a plethora of pundits have sought to corner the elusive term, “social media,” within a dictionary. . . .
Yet while definitions are important, to sell the field that everyone talks about but few can illuminate, we social media strategists need to reframe the conversation. Instead of striving for Merriam-Webster precision, we would do better if we focused on case studies.
A version of this blog post appeared on LindsayOlson.com on August 1, 2011.
“We’re gonna make your logo pop! We’re gonna make the IPREX globe spin! And we’re gonna make the buttons beautiful!”
“A button can be beautiful?” asked a skeptical Susan.
“Oh yeah!” beamed a confident Jesse.
It was at this moment that Jesse had Susan. He’d been muddling through the meeting, but this burst of bravura, energy and passion was sincere and infectious—a gust of fresh wind that I believe won him the contract to redesign SusanDavis.com.
Similarly, when I myself interviewed with Susan, things coasted along for the first 15 minutes. She asked about my experience; I provided conventional answers. Then she deployed her pet question: “If you were an animal, what would you be?”
”That’s easy,” I grinned. “I’d be a dog.” It was at this moment that I had Susan. With great pride and obvious pleasure, I regaled her with stories of my miniature schnauzer, Wyatt.
One final example. I was one of a three-person team interviewing a potential subcontractor. It was clear this husband-and-wife duo could do the job, but they lacked fire in the belly. And because it wasn’t clear that they really wanted the gig, it wasn’t clear if they’d be fun to work with.
Sensing this, my boss’s boss changed direction and pinged the pair with the following question: “Can you tell us about any of your extracurricular activities that relate to the military?”
The husband tilted his chair back, searched his memory, then tilted forward. “Sure,” Chris said, as he proceeded to uncork a heartfelt narrative about a recent weekend when he was playing video games. When his wife returned home, she told him about a veterans charity she had just read about. The story so moved Chris that he dropped his controller and stayed up all night voluntarily coding for the nonprofit.
“If these guys can sacrifice their lives for their country, I can sacrifice a night’s sleep,” he said with a gleam in his theretofore sleepy eyes. It was at this moment that he had us.
To an artist like Jesse, attention to the seeming minutia of Web design was no big deal. To a PR guy like me, naming five national reporters mattered more than discussing my dog. To an engineer like Chris, proposals ought to be won or lost on their merits, not on what the bidders do in their spare time.
Yet what all three of us failed to appreciate was the import of passion. Fortunately, we each were tossed a soft ball to rectify this. Not everyone is so lucky. It shouldn’t take prompting to light your fuse.
Passion, of course, isn’t a substitute for talent. It is, however, a key differentiator, revealing what makes you tick, what drives you, what you’re capable of achieving in the right circumstances. To exude such enthusiasm is to show character. To withhold it is to be average.
So, the next time you’re in an important meeting—be it an interview, a sales pitch, even a date—relax that uncomfortable façade, slacken your stilted smile, and unbottle your passion. No doubt, you’ll be more comfortable. And more successful.
Mention the phrase “blogger engagement” to today’s marketer, and you’re likely to get an eager response, followed by self-professed ignorance. “We’d love to do that—we just don’t know how.”
To some, this scenario spells new business. (In part, this explains why manyagenciesseparate their “digital” practice from their traditional ones.) Yet an honest blogger whisperer will let you in on a secret: If you can pitch a reporter, producer, or booker, you can pitch a blogger. After all, bloggers are just people—susceptible to the same charm-and-disarm techniques that every PR pro performs every day.
Indeed, the best way to understand bloggers is to view them as members of the media. Think of blogger engagement as public relations, albeit a new kind. Neither straight reporter nor pure pundit, the blogger is a hybrid creature who observes his own rules.
For example, you wouldn’t pitch the Joe Fridays at NYTimes.com, whose practices would make the Columbia School of Journalism proud, the same way you’d pitch the wits at Gawker Media, who aspire to an “angry-creative-underclass voice.” Instead, in order to get the results you want, it would behoove you to treat bloggers on their terms, not your own.
Here are nine of these terms—with the caveat that only after you know the rules is it ok to break them.
1. Write As if Your E-mail Will Be Published
Think of this as Joe Kennedy 101. The patriarch of the Kennedy family famously advised his children not to write “anything down that you wouldn’t want published on the front page of the New York Times.”
Indeed, if your pitch is good, your blogger may integrate your copy into his verbatim, without acknowledging his source. If you pitch is bad, your blogger may forward it to the Bad Pitch Blog. As SHIFT Communications advises, “If you pitch isn’t good enough to be published as is, don’t send it.”
2. Connect and Flatter
Think of this as Psychology 101. Like most things in life, blogger engagement is built on relationships. And relationships that flourish tend to sprout from common interests. As Lisa Barone, of Outspoken Media, advises (my emphasis):
“Snuggle me a little. You know you’re sending the same e-mail to 20 people. I know you’re sending the same e-mail to 20 people. But sometimes you gotta fake it to make me feel special and pretty … Woo me … Talk about how you grew up in the same hometown (only if you did). Comment on a post I wrote that gave you a bad case of the giggles, or how you think my Twitter feed should come with an NC-17 rating … I’ll be a lot more receptive once you’ve stroked my ego.”
In other words, your initial message is your opportunity to demonstrate that you’ve done more than copy and paste the blogger’s name and e-mail address. Show that you’ve taken the time to learn about this guy and are familiar with his work. Show that you’re someone worth engaging with.
A related point. Blogging is a personal and relational medium, so send e-mail blasts only when you must. Ask yourself: Do you treat messages in which you’re CCed differently from those in which you’re the only recipient?
3. Make Your Pitch
Think of this as Public Relations 101. The secret to PR: Make the blogger feel as though you’re doing him a favor, not asking for one yourself. Explain why the blogger should care about what you’re throwing him.
4. Exude Enthusiasm
Think of this as Showmanship 101. If you aren’t jumping for joy about what you’re pitching, your recipient won’t be, either. Enthusiasm is contagious. Spread it around.
5. Don’t Pitch—Talk
Think of this as Communications 101. Hacks have long relied on flacks. But bloggers, especially in tier one, tend to look at PR people askance. As Nick Denton, founder of Gawker Media, puts it, “Our sites are allergic to corporate boilerplate.”
This is understandable. For one, while it’s common to spam a hundred reporters with a press release, bloggers loathe releases. Instead, omit the manufactured quotes and summarize the key points—maybe in bullets for easy reading.
6. Be Brief
We live in an era of texts and tweets. According to blogger Brian Solis, “The escalator is the new elevator when it comes to pitching.” To wit: You now need to be both succinct and brief. This means resisting the urge to cram everything into a single message.
Instead of attaching PDFs and PowerPoints, use links generously. Your goal is to whet your blogger’s appetite, to spur an ongoing conversation, rather than a once-and-done correspondence.
7. Make the Ask
Think of this as Sales 101. Before you close the deal, you need to make it clear what the deal is. In the same way, don’t forget to tell your blogger why you’re e-mailing him. If you’re looking for him to write something, say so.
If you’re just introducing yourself or asking for feedback, say that. Be explicit without being Donald Trump.
8. Exploit the Subject Line
Think of this as Marketing 101. Most people devote all their energy to crafting a compelling pitch, then wrap their labor in a cheap bow. That is, they treat the subject lines of their e-mail as an afterthought.
Big mistake. Your subject line is an opportunity. Like the headline of an article, its point is to persuade the reader to continue onward. Accordingly, make sure that your subject line does your body text justice.
9. Practice Full Disclosure
Someone’s paying you to talk with bloggers, a fact it behooves you to disclose. Some experts would advise you to begin your e-mail with something like, “Hi, I’m Jon Rick. I do online communications for the Department of Labor.” Others suggest that your signature block serve as your introduction.
Whatever you prefer, remember that not only is transparency important in itself. Transparency also breeds trust.
A version of this blog post appeared on Blogcritics on June 15, 2011.
It’s only natural. Each time you glance at your stats, you can’t help but notice that the number of your followers has dipped. Who defriended me, you wonder? Sometimes you have an inkling. Wouldn’t it be nice if there were a way to confirm your inkling, a service that automatically notified you of your shrinking status? Let’s review the top four free services that promise to do just that.
1. Goodbye, Buddy. If you follow @GoodbyeBuddy, within a day or two, this bare-bones program will chart anyone who’s unfollowed you. It checks for changes “many times a day,” and publishes the result every two.
The cons: The only way to see who’s unfollowed you is to visit GoodbyeBuddy.com; there’s no way to be notified—unless you pay $2/month, in which case you’ll get a DM for each defriending.
The takeaway: It doesn’t work. Despite having registered with the service about two weeks ago—and been unfollowed by more than a dozen people since then—Goodbye, Buddy reports that I have “0 unfollowers.”
2. TwentyFeet. TwentyFeet presents an array of tidy charts about your Twitter and Facebook accounts. (For $2.50/year/service, you also can learn more than you wanted to know about your bit.ly, MySpace, YouTube, and—WTF—Google Analytics accounts.)
The cons: No notification; the only way to see who’s unfollowed you is to visit TwentyFeet.com, where you need jump through several screens.
The takeaway: If you have patience and love data, give TwentyFeet a whirl.
3. Qwitter. Qwitter sends you a daily e-mail showing your former friends.
The pros: It’s been around for a while.
The cons: The “daily” e-mails arrive every month or so; the last one I received came on April 6.
The takeaway: Would be great if it worked as promised.
4. Nutshell Mail. Owned by Constant Contact, NutshellMail delivers a daily e-mail detailing your activities on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Foursquare, Yelp, and Citysearch. (It also tracks MySpace, but who uses MySpace anymore?)
The pros: Easy to use and powerful. You can specify the time of your e-mail, and customize which data the message displays.
The cons: None. (The e-mails don’t even have ads.)
The takeaway: To use NutshellMail is to love it.
Addendum: As it happens, the Gadget Cage blog recently ran a similar post.
A version of this blog post appeared on Technorati (June 13, 2011), GovLoop (June 14, 2011), and K Street Cafe (June 14, 2011).
One of the most overlooked opportunities for online marketing also happens to be one of the most ubiquitous: the e-mail “signature”
One of the first things new employees do is create a “signature block” for their e-mails. These half a dozen lines or so, consisting of your contact info, plop themselves at the bottom of every e-mail you send. Yet few people put any thought into their e-signature, let alone alter it after it’s typed.
This modus operandi reflects a 1.0 mindset. Let’s upgrade it.
First, think of the e-signature the same way you think of business cards: they reflect upon your organization’s brand. This is why every employee’s card looks the same and contains the same basic information: because each flows from a uniform design template.
Yet most organizations treat the e-signature as an afterthought. They’ll hire someone to design a business card, stationary, and even envelopes and labels, but utterly neglect e-mail—which, of course, reaches far more people than do the aforementioned materials combined.
As a result, each employee fashions his own e-signature. Some people include their job title; others don’t. Some link to the company Web site; others link to the company’s social networks (or their own). Some prefer hyphens or periods to parenthesis in listing a phone number; others want to abbreviate “Parkway” as “Pkwy” or “Pkwy.” Still others include a quotation, while others favor fancy fonts.
Everyone gets the basic info across, but these differences make your organization look sloppy and unprofessional. After all, you wouldn’t allow each employee to design his own business card, would you?
By contrast, let’s say you developed a template that standardized these data, so that everyone’s e-signature was uniform. The template might exhibit your organization’s colors, publicize your tagline, link to your Web site. Your recipients, no doubt, would be impressed that your firm is organized, detail-minded, savvy.
Equally important—yet overlooked even more—are e-mails sent from your smartphone. By default, a mobile signature consists of advertising such as “Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry” or “Sent via iPhone.” But just as you wouldn’t let the vendor that printed your annual reports stamp its imprint on each page, so you shouldn’t give corporate giants free ads in your e-mails. Instead, reserve this precious real estate for yourself (or at least for humor, as in “Sent using my thumbs; please excuse typoss”).
Finally, reconsider the content of your e-signature. Rather than limiting yourself to titles and numbers, why not add a line to promote one of your current projects? As with Twitter, a succinct, catchy sentence that’s hyperlinked is most effective. For example, given a project for the General Aviation Manufacturers Association, you might write, “How do you rebrand general aviation’s leading advocate?”
Again, consistency is crucial. To maximize your branding, not only should everyone participate; everyone also should use the same one-liners and change them at agreed-upon intervals.
None of these suggestions is revolutionary. To the contrary, they constitute modest tweaks. Yet it’s through such seeming minutiae that good brands distinguish themselves from great brands.
A version of this blog post appeared on the Rock Creek Blog on January 26, 2011.
Last month, TechCrunch reported that the popular bookmarking site, Delicious, is trapped in “purgatory”: Owner Yahoo wants to sell the property, but in a way that protects Yahoo’s proprietary’s technology that Delicious shares with the rest of the purple family. Yet whatever its fate, Delicious continues to offer a service that’s not only superior to the competition but that also should be part of every digital PR toolkit. Here’s why.
Quick: Your client asks you for a list of articles about X. You’ve been sent many of these articles before—whether through Google Alerts, forwarded links, or even hard copies—yet unless you’re paying to use a service such as Vocus, you likely haven’t been compiling clips. What do you do?
The first three options suffer from at least one of the following headaches: They’re expensive, time-consuming, cumbersome, inefficient, or stovepiped. By contrast, option four—social bookmarking—is free, easy, powerful, and centralized.
This last point is especially important. It means that your data aren’t walled-off on an internal hard drive, but stored in the cloud. No longer do you need to be in the office to access a shared drive or beg the IT department for admin privileges; you just need access to Delicious.com.
As for the “social” part of bookmarking, not only are your clips public (unless you choose otherwise), but Delicious also allows you to see who else is logging the same articles. You then can “friend” these folks and use their links to broaden your reading sources.
To be sure, Delicious isn’t heaven. It works only with articles that appeared somewhere online. It stores only an excerpt rather than the full text. And it can’t sort by publication date. Yet, if nothing else, isn’t bookmarking better than what you’re doing now?
A version of this blog post appeared in PRWeek on December 17, 2010.
After a conference or happy hour, many people find their pockets stuffed with business cards. If it was a productive event, the next morning you may be unable to pair each card with a face.
For the faces you remember, it’s customary to send off a nice-to-meet-you-hope-to-see-you-again e-mail. Often, the reply is just as trite.
This is the 1.0 way to follow-up: toilsome and monotonous. First you need to remember what you discussed, then you need to craft a non-cliched missive. Then, when the need arises for a real follow-up, you run into e-mail’s static limitations.
Consider this all-too-common scenario. After swapping e-pleasantries, a few weeks pass, then months. Suddenly it’s a year later and you’re trying to get a meeting with the head of advertising at the Chamber of Commerce. Wait—doesn’t that woman you met at the reception on K Street work there?
You race through your inbox, your deleted items folder, your auto-archive files. If you’re lucky, you find the messages. Then you dig through your business card stack, Rolodex, and address book, hoping to piece together a connection you made—a mutual friend, a place, hobby, anything. Finally, you Google her. Among the top search results: links to her social networking (socnet) profiles.
If you’re lucky, this research jogs your memory; you both grew up in San Diego! And yet, there’s no avoiding that your entire relationship consists of 15 minutes in person and two nondescriptive e-mails, both of which took place last winter.
By contrast, what if you had initially followed-up via a socnet? What if you had friended Jane on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn?
Not only would this have obviated a greeting—you simply click the “Follow” or “Add As Friend” button—it also would have allowed you to stay in touch and get to know one another. Indeed, since most people use an avatar, each time her name crossed your news feed, you would have seen her headshot.
Now, one year later, when you want to reach Jane, you’re not forced to say, “Remember me?” Instead, you know her a little, and probably discovered that you have several things in common.
This is the 2.0 way to follow-up: effortless, entertaining, and dynamic.
Try it the next time you find yourself beginning an e-mail with the line, “Nice to meet you…”
A version of this blog post appeared on K Street Cafe (September 14, 2010) and GovLoop (September 15, 2010).
A few days ago, a colleague asked for help with a predicament common in Gov 2.0 circles: how to educate her colleagues, managers, and clients to rely more on a project wiki and less on e-mail? (Broadly defined, a “wiki” can be as simple as a folder or set of folders on a shared hard drive or as complex as a SharePoint “component” designed to look and feel like Wikipedia.) For example, how do you get someone to check the wiki for a document rather than e-mailing someone else for it? Then, once user A has the document and needs feedback on it, how do you get her to distribute a link to the wiki rather than distributing the document itself?
The first thing you might do is survey your team. Why do some people live and die by the wiki, while others shun it? What’s helpful, what can be improved, what alternatives would users recommend? These findings can facilitate several next steps.
1. “It doesn’t work.” To the extent possible, you should tweak the wiki to fix any technical glitches and simplify any cumbersome processes. Such frustrations are very real, and anything you can do to minimize them will make you a hero. (Whoever invents the version of iShare, eShare, or SharePoint that allows you to download documents from a smartphone, no doubt will make a killing.)
2. “It’s extra work.” When was the last time you communicated the wiki’s purpose and benefits to the team? Holding a meeting presents two opportunities: it allows users to vent directly to management, and it allows management to say, We hear you; here’s what we’re doing about it; here’s how you can help; and, most important, here’s why we’re using the wiki in the first place. Plus, in the future, when the temptation arises for a user to e-mail someone a question, feelings of guilt may prompt the user to visit the wiki first to see if she can learn the answer herself.
3. “I don’t want to.” If necessary, a project’s senior leaders may want issue a directive to use e-mail only after checking the wiki. Of course, these leaders should be following their own advice, and be wiki-ing themselves. “Because the boss said so” is a powerful motivator; “if the boss can do so, so can I” is even better.
4. “I don’t know how to use it.” Every complex initiative should have an FAQ document. Sample questions for a wiki: Where do I go to find X? If I’m inactive for X minutes, does the wiki log me off? What functions don’t work (well) using Firefox rather than Internet Explorer?
5. “Nobody uses it.” In the end, nothing succeeds like peer pressure. The more people you convince, the greater your chance of success.
Finally, don’t discount the possibility that a wiki isn’t right for your project. Plenty of tools exist to accomplish even the most discrete tasks. As consultants, it behooves us to remember that what a client wants is not necessarily best, and that the end is more important than the means.
It took a recession, but resumes finally are receiving renewed scrutiny. The ability to embellish and obscure shrinks when one out of every six workers is under or unemployed. More than ever, recruiters want to see accomplishments, not responsibilities; numbers, not adverbs.
Certain professions have it easier than others. If you’re a lobbyist, you cite legislation passed or defeated. If you’re a fundraiser, you count dollars raised. If you’re a political operative, you record a win-loss record.
Alas, if you’re a social media consultant, you probably shun such metrics. Sure, you’ve helped clients tweet and blog, but who among us hasn’t? Sure, you have 10 years of experience, but what have you achieved?
For instance, does your resume refer to “viral videos”? Sounds impressive, right? Well, how many views have these sensations attracted? Have you supported a Web site redesign? How much did that bolster traffic, and how many unique monthly visitors did that result in?
Did you manage an e-mail list? How many people subscribed to it, and how many joined under your watch? Did you conduct blogger outreach? Name five bloggers you’ve successfully pitched.
Did you execute search engine optimization? By what percentages did that drive up organic traffic and referral traffic, and how many negative and positive stories did you navigate in and out of the top 10 search results?
To be sure, numbers don’t paint a perfect picture. They omit client satisfaction, can elevate quantity to the detriment of quality, and can be massaged.
Moreover, numbers are only a means to an end. So, you doubled the audience for your podcast? Nice! Now tell us how this affected the bottom line. Did it engender a 30% bump in donations? A 50% jump in e-commerce sales? A 100% spike in membership?
Taking these extra steps requires extra work. Yet those confident in their CVs should embrace this charge. After all, there’s nothing like cold hard data to reveal that the common claim, “increased significantly,” in fact was a trivial 8% uptick.
Indeed, like the SAT, numbers serve a crucial purpose: They constitute a uniform, relatively transparent credential. As such, they help to address perhaps the biggest complaint about social media: How to measure its return on investment.
Posted by Jonathan Rick in 
Before entering the digital space…
I flacked for the American Conservative Union and the Cato Institute, and reported for Time magazine and the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.