A couple of days ago Jeremiah Owyang spent some time outlining the ‘Four Tenants of the Community Manager,’ which is extremely interesting in light of the panel I participated in last week on PR versus advertising.

I think the concept of a ‘community manager’ is really starting to pick up steam and is an alternative answer to the question of who takes control of social media as it continues to gain prominence.

Over a decade ago when I was a senior at Hawken School I can remember listening to a conversation between Dr. Carr, our headmaster at the time, and our IT manager (whose name I can’t remember). The year was 1996 and Google had yet to reach omnipotence. As a matter of fact, Netscape and Yahoo! were the search engines of choice.

I vividly recall Carr saying that with the tremendous aggregation of content occurring online, the primary challenge would be what to do with all the content.  In hindsight, Carr’s point seems fairly acute considering Google’s search algorithm has not only served to frame our experience of the Internet, but “Googling” has become entrenched in our everyday lives.

As Google continues to grow at an unprecedented rate and purchase just about every emerging start-up that comes onto the horizon, it seems that the warnings of theorists like Hargittai, McChesney, Nissenbaum (and a host of others) are coming to fruition.

Take for example Google’s purchase of Blogger, a popular blog content management software. The usability of content management systems like Blogger is what is fueling the movement popularly referred to as Web 2.0 or social media because software like Blogger facilitates the gap between thought and actualization through publishing.

From a commercial perspective the value of Blogger to Google is in the advertising that can be sold on the content that is being fueled by the software. Although from an aesthetic perspective Blogger may not look like it is fully integrated into the Googleopoly, make no mistake - it is fully integrated. As a matter of fact, AdSense (Google’s ad network) is integrated directly into the dashboard itself making it easy for anyone to set up a blog and start making money through their blog in a matter of seconds. And with every new blog that is set up, and every cent earned from a click, Google’s power expands.

Now what happens in search is that Google will find ways to boost the visibility of Blogger because the more visible Blogger is, the more money Google stands to earn.

Sound like a conspiracy theory? Just run a Google query for blog and see for yourself. Wikipedia comes up in the pole position, immediately followed by Blogger. The official Google blog comes up #4. What’s more, the blogs that run on Blogger consistently perform at the top of the Google heap.

What is funny to me about all this is that traditionally, the Google brand has been associated with openness and innovation, but their blogging software is far inferior to the open source WordPress (which this blog runs on). It seems like most of the “innovations” being released by Blogger are oriented around making it easier for a broader population of people to publish and sell advertising on their content.

So Google has social media figured out then?

Wrong.

The competitive advantage that has brought Google to the forefront of the online world and kept them firmly entrenched at #1, has been the algorithm.

The algorithm is all about search and retrieval, it is about eternally answering the questions of a mass audience of empowered media consumers.

By “empowered” I mean that we are still media consumers but we have more of an ability to make choices about which media we consume - because of solutions like Google.

Suddenly, we are entering a second wave of media inundation and I don’t believe that the Google algorithm is going to be able of handling the evolving needs of a population of online users who have shifted from being empowered consumers into something new.

My own anecdotal experience reveals an inbox flooded with e-mails and Web alerts, an RSS reader flooded with feeds I have subscribed to, social network profiles that have countless messages, an IM client flooded with messages, and a Web browser flooded with bookmarks.  This is the net result of my own evolution from being an empowered media consumer to being a media producer, and the similar evolution of others within my network.

My solution to this new wave of inundation is currently ad-hoc. I browse over the titles of the various messages, pay special attention to the sender of the message and try to prioritize based on my job responsibilities, family responsibilities, etc.. These are all activities that are so personal and spontaneous that the Google algorithm simply does me no good.

If I need information on a restaurant I am interested in going to I know Google will be there, but if I need a method for helping to organize my everyday experience of the Web - Google has simply fallen by the wayside and selling more AdSense and juicing their properties in search isn’t the way for Google to pick up its game.

Returning back to Dr. Carr’s prophetic vision of the future, it is my belief that the next challenge we face will be to move beyond search and to something new - something more personalized and reflexive than search. Something that we adopt that helps filter our new experience of the Internet into something manageable and perhaps even enjoyable.

This will be life after Google.

I spoke on a panel last week with some of my industry peers on how social media is impacting Public Relations, Marketing and Advertising. There were some great people on the panel including Thomas Burg from DoubleClick, Sarah Skerik from PR Newswire, Larry Thomas from Medialink, Robert Fitzgerald from BizBash, Miranda Tan from MyPRGenie, and Dr. Kolb from Text 100. The panel was moderated by Heidi Cohen.

It was well worth the trip up to New York to hear the thoughts from some of these guys and share my own. On the train up, I jotted down some thoughts on the topics that were to be covered in the panel. It is funny however, because once we started talking I didn’t really end up saying anything that I had jotted down prior to the discussion. Ah well, I can always post them to my blog.

1. What is marketing’s role in today’s marketing mix? What is PR’s role in today’s marketing mix? How has this changed given that marketers are now brand ambassadors not brand stewards?

First part of the question: Marketing’s role in today’s marketing mix seems like a tautological proposition to me. Marketing encompasses all of the various methodologies that are clustered into today’s marketing mix including public relations and advertising.

Second part of the question: Within the broader area of marketing today, I believe that public relations still predominantly plays a role of helping to frame the public perception of an organization through a variety of methods. I don’t believe that the general proposition of public relations has fundamentally changed, or at least I haven’t seen any broad-based studies that would substantiate anything revolutionary in the industry. Perhaps the channels and tactics have changed substantially in the past ten years or so.

Third part of the question: Ambassador versus steward seems like a semantic distinction at best. Perhaps there has been a shift in power when it comes to the role of marketing within organizations. I think that many people are talking about marketing having a ’seat at the table’ these days and I think they are sitting at the table. Whether they are ordering dinner for everybody remains to be seen. I think there are broader institutional issues that complicate the question of power as it pertains to the role of marketing within an organization.

2. How does PR differ from marketing and/or advertising?

I’ve always felt that PR and advertising are methodologies that traditionally fall under the umbrella of marketing. I think that the most relevant comparisons probably can be drawn between PR and advertising. They are both communication methods - there is a message to be delivered, a form that message will take, an audience who will receive the message, channels through which the audience is reached, a particular approach that is taken, and finally there is a goal to be accomplished through the action. Now, the distinctions between advertising and PR exist in that framework at almost every stop:

1. Message - Ad messages tend to be more sales driven than PR messages, which may be more issues or brand-driven.
2. Form - In ads, the form can be more artistic and creative than PR. The reaction is more emotional than in PR. PR really should be about direct, clear communications.
3. Channels - Although both PR and ad messages can travel through multiple channels, the placement within channels is somewhat different. Ads are normally outside the flow of core channel communication - they exist in an interstitial manner. PR messages are more immersed within the flow of core channel communications.
4. Audience - The audiences for ad efforts are normally consumers; for PR, it can be a more disparate - consumers, journalists, analysts, stakeholders, etc.
5. Approach - Advertising is normally about straight media buys. PR is more about earned media - generating media via efforts to connect and compel other influencers or communicating directly to direct stakeholders.
6. Goal - Advertising is normally measured in impact on revenue; whereas PR can be far more ambiguous to measure. PR can be measured in media ‘hits’ but often times, it is hits that are avoided through PR efforts.

3. Who owns or is responsible for the marketing mix? Are PR and Marketing roles well defined?

My impression is that PR has traditionally existed as a separate unit from Marketing in larger organizations and probably within Marketing in most mid- to smaller organizations. So I guess it depends on the size of the organization. Also, I’m sure it depends on the business of the organization. If the organization is a revenue-driven machine without significant reputation challenges then it probably makes more sense for PR to exist within marketing, if the organization has critical PR issues then it probably makes more sense for PR to exist as a separate unit, reporting directly to the organizational leadership.

4. Which Web 2.0 tools do you recommend to companies and why?

In my opinion this question is problematic. The entire concept of Web 2.0 is problematic to me because I feel like using “2.0″ intrinsically seeks to draw a line in the sand from what the Internet was about ten or even five years ago and that is a mistake. Since its initial conception the Internet has been driven by the power of collaboration and what we see now is simply an extension of this collaboration. The tools have gotten better and more accessible to people so that has brought an influx of users to the collaborative aspects of the Internet. I would recommend that companies acknowledge that there is a broader audience who are participating in collaborative activities online now, and think about how they want to interface with this emerging segment.

5. Which of the web 2.0 techniques/tools do you find most effective for building a company’s reputation and why?

I think organizational acknowledgment of the existence of a relevant discussion online, followed by consensus that an organization should participate in this discussion is the most effective manner through which to proceed.

6. How should PR/marketing professional interact with bloggers, podcasters, social media communities? What type of impact does this have on achieving desired results?

These online influencers and networks are largely set apart from traditional media institutions, don’t have substantial editorial hurdles to overcome, and have the capability to publish their thoughts and perspectives online as quickly as they can pick up the phone and talk about them. In other words, communicators should tread lightly when approaching the space. Actually, the best way to engage with the space is to start participating. Communicators should simply join relevant online communities, familiarize themselves with the influencers, and begin publishing content through blogs, podcasts, etc. That way they can familiarize themselves with the etiquette that is involved and eliminate a great deal of risk.

7. What is an example of a web 2.0 PR/Advertising campaign that you think was well implemented and why?

Campaign is sort of an interesting notion in social media because campaigns imply formative research and planning, testing, launch, campaign end-point, and post-campaign analysis. I think that some of the more successful efforts have involved individuals and organizations simply jumping in and getting involved. Quite frankly, I haven’t seen many examples of phenomenal Web 2.0 PR/Advertising campaigns. I love how Google uses blogs to communicate. I also really dug the Colbert Green Screen challenge.

8. With Web 2.0, marketers no longer control the conversation, how do they use it to accomplish specific business objectives such as customer acquisition and increasing sales? What role do PR professionals play? Marketers? Advertisers?

Did marketers ever control the conversation? I think SEO marketers are probably the most sophisticated when it comes to measuring return on social media efforts. Social media campaigns can have a pretty dramatic impact as far as driving traffic and improving search positioning. Therefore, I feel like SEO marketers are well positioned to drive a lot of the push because at the end of a quarter they can retrospectively look back and define what they have accomplished with indicators that an executive is going to understand. It is a lot harder to explain to an executive the value of connecting with customers, online influencers and/or bloggers than it is to say “we increased traffic 25% through our social media efforts and saw a 10% revenue increase through Web sales.”

I think PR professionals are going to have the unenviable job of keeping marketers in check, and playing defense largely. They are going to have to make sure that the messages that are coming out of an organization, through social media channels, link up to the overall organizational communications strategy. They are going to have to clean up the mess if bloggers get upset over a marketing initiative in social media.

9. While people have been recommending businesses and services for years, what makes the role that Web 2.0 through blogs, podcasts and social media sites plays in this process different?

Well for one, the stuff that people say about your brand or product offline has a shorter shelf-life. Online, it is there for a while getting indexed and served in search engines, being seen by people who visit your blog, etc. Word-of-mouth gets branded in a literal sense online. Also, I suppose the viral potential is probably greater because the material barriers aren’t the same.

10. Marketing isn’t limited to special promotions or events. Some of the conversation may not be related to traditional marketing functions such as customer service and investor relations. It can range from customer comments on product such as Amazon and Bazaarvoice to investor podcasts and webinars. How should a company be organized to handle this and how should marketing tap into this conversation? What role does Marketing play in this dialog? What role does PR play in this dialog?

This is a broad question. Actually this is really like five or six questions bundled into one so I’m going to respond to one segment of it: customer comments on eCommerce sites or other online communities. There are a number of online monitoring and analysis services out there that will help you become aware of the things being said about you online. The important thing is to be aware of what is going on. If there are falsifications being spread, then consider outreach after weighing the influence of the person spreading the falsification and the space where it is being spread. At the same time, there is going to be some criticism that is founded in truth so in those situations, you should look at it as market research and consider how you can use it to improve your product or service. The important thing is to be aware.

11. By its nature, unlike traditional forms of marketing and PR, web 2.0 marketing requires a level of corporate transparency. Does this mean that it can only be used by certain types of businesses such as start ups that need to build buzz with limited budgets or ones targeted at teens and twenty-somethings? What about financial institutions or pharma brands which are highly regulated?

This question is interesting to me because it is basically saying that social media requires transparency and honesty, so should financial institutions or pharma brands get involved? At any rate, I think what highly regulated institutions need to understand is that social media is starting to become ingrained in our everyday lives. Not only are their customers and stakeholders participating, but it is likely that their detractors and competitors are participating. Even if they have to deal with more hurdles I think it becomes a question of whether to start dealing with those hurdles now or later. Do they want to be reactive or proactive?

12. With the growth of newer forms of Web 2.0 including blogs, podcasts and social media, companies need to get better at monitoring the conversation. How should companies do this?

There are a number of services out there that companies should look into. For smaller companies without a budget, there are free services with some of the aggregators like Technorati and Google.

14. What do marketers need to do to ensure that their Web 2.0 campaigns stay ethical and provide value to consumers?

Well, unethical online campaigns are going to be found out and result in a negative impact for the company. From a cost-benefit perspective there is simply no sense in planning and executing an unethical campaign through social media.

Update (11/19/07): Dr. Georg Kolb from Text 100 has provided a great write-up of the panel.

Got a tip from the kind folks at ZexSports the other day who I met at ad:tech last week, that Ypulse had a great list of tips for self-promoting your book, including a nice toss-in about using PRWeb to get your press release out.

A Forrester Research, Inc. report released at the Forrester Consumer Forum in Chicago this past month provided survey results from a sample of 344 interactive marketing professionals who were asked about their budgeting decisions throughout various forms of interactive marketing.

Forrester extrapolated that over the next five years, spending on interactive marketing will grow at a 27% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and its share of marketing budget will grow from 8% to 18% of total ad spending.

The majority of this projected growth will be distributed amongst search marketing (projected to grow to $25 billion) and display advertising (projected to reach $14 billion). Of special interest was Forrester’s prediction that spending on social media will grow to $6.9 billion over the next five years, which would surpass their projections for mobile marketing ($2.8 billion) and e-mail marketing ($4 billion). Another major area of growth will be in online video advertising, which Forrester projects could reach $7.1 billion by 2012.

Of course, predicting growth in online spending five-years in advance based on a survey of 350 online marketing professionals is probably not the most methodologically sound approach in the world. In other words, I wouldn’t mortgage the house to start investing in social media companies quite yet but at the same time I believe the survey results are a good indicator of the current perspective on the growing importance and potential of social media.

Early Monday morning I hopped on a train and headed up to New York for two days at ad:tech. For several years now, PRWeb has had a presence at the ad:tech events and from what I understood they were always terrific opportunities to educate potential customers on the benefits of our service, re-connect with current customers, see what is new in the market and network with potential partners. We had a steady stream of attendees throughout both days we were at the show and I feel comfortable that we accomplished everything we set out to accomplish by participating in the show.

In the midst of all the companies selling SEO and affiliate marketing services, I think the ‘PR’ in ‘PRWeb’ attracted many of attendees who had never heard of PRWeb. Those unfamiliar with the service almost immediately saw the benefit in using PRWeb to publicize their business, and I suppose that is one of the nice things about presenting PRWeb at an event where a majority of the attendees already have a firm grasp of newer information/communication technologies. Two guys who stopped by the booth actually darted back to their hotel room immediately after talking with Joe because they had a press release and wanted to send it out through PRWeb ASAP.

Of course, a majority of visitors to the booth were either current customers who were interested in what was coming down the pipeline, or people who had heard about us through word-of-mouth and wanted to learn more about our service. I could hear many of those who walked by turn and say to their companions, “Oh, that’s PRWeb. We already use them.”

As for the demographic of customers and prospects stopping by the booth, there were certainly a fair share of PR people but the majority were small business owners or marketing professionals.

Walking around the conference it seemed there were increasing numbers of services that attempted to connect customers with social media. Of these a few that stood out to me included:

1. BuzzLogic - The holistic platform focused on influencer relations had a really cool new feature, ‘influencer advertising,’ that provided customers with a method for targeting ads in social media hot spots. Radian6 seems to be an emerging player in this area although right now they seem to lean a bit more heavily to the monitoring/analysis side than the outreach side. At the same time, they have one of the coolest platforms I’ve seen in a while, as well as a refreshing and hip brand aesthetic.
2. Creativeweblogging - A global network of bloggers that offers a variety of advertising options to customers. I noticed a couple of blogger networks as a matter of fact and feel like we may see more to come in the next couple of years.
3. Blogsvertise / PayPerPost - I couldn’t really note any discernible difference between PayPerPost and Blogsvertise. In fact I think their logos even use the same font.

All in all, it was a great opportunity to meet and connect with customers and prospects and re-acclimate myself with the cutting-edge of the industry.

Note: Lee Odden’s blog provides a great multimedia experience of ad:tech in case you want to learn more.

In a recent blog posting, Chris Anderson, executive editor of Wired magazine published e-mail addresses from 329 e-mails he had blocked from PR firms who had sent him pitch e-mails including Edelman, 5W Public Relations, Fleishman-Hillard, Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide and Weber Shandwick.

The posting was titled, ‘Sorry PR People: You’re Blocked‘.

Actually, it is not that he minds receiving e-mail from PR firms, his main issue seems to be with the approach that many PR firms take.  In New York Times coverage of the posting, Anderson explained that his main issue with these firms is that “they can’t be bothered to find out who on my staff, if anyone, might actually be interested in what they’re pitching.”

Back when I was helping direct online services at v-Fluence I recall a series of heated exchanges over the relative merits of Overture’s search term suggestion tool versus Wordtracker.  Now it all seems relatively minor but at the time, I argued rather passionately in favor of Overture’s search term suggestion tool because of my instinct that they were drawing query data from a larger sample and therefore had a smaller margin of error.  The opposing voice (which I concede was ultimately the voice of reason) argued that because the data from Overture was not as detail-oriented and granular it was not a viable option. 

After meeting with Wordtracker several years after this debate and discussing the relative merits of their data, I feel as though they are far and away the best solution in the industry.  Their entire business approach seems to be oriented around providing the highest degree of service to their customer at the best possible price. 

What especially stood out to me was when Mike Mindel (the CTO at Wordtracker) showed me a mashup he had been working on that correlated their data to Google trends, which he made freely available to anyone via their Web site as well as their free keyword suggestion tool.

Wordtracker’s Google Mashup 

As Mike walked me through some research results he had recently obtained, his eyes widened and he began gesticulating emphatically – and I suddenly realized that this was a guy who was truly engaged and passionate about the work he was doing. 

When I asked him how Wordtracker stacked up to the competition I felt as though Mike was candidly fielding my questions.  Moving forward, it seems like there is no real reason for me not to use Wordtracker for keyword research.

I am a bit surprised that this hasn’t received a bit more exposure in the mainstream media but there has been an ongoing scam being conducted on MySpace that involves the Macy’s brand.

In a nut shell, the scam works like this:

Phase I: Phishing for Credentials

1. The scammer (I think they are called PromotionalPalace) somehow acquires a MySpace users credentials.
2. They then send out a mass e-mail from the MySpace user’s account to all his/her friends, saying intriguing something like “I can’t believe that _______ put those pictures up.”
3. There is a hyperlink from ‘those pictures’ that directs the MySpace user to a fake MySpace page that prompts them to log-in with their credentials before proceeding.
4. The credentials are then captured by the scammer and the MySpace user enters back into the normal flow of MySpace, confused about what just happened (Note: if MySpace wasn’t so buggy to begin with people might be a bit more suspicious after this just happened to them).

Phase II: The Scam

1. Once the scammer has collected a large volume of credentials, they launch their scam campaign. This involves logging into the various MySpace users’ accounts and then posting an advertisement on all that user’s friends’ pages. Here is what the ad looks like:



2. This ad direct to a site where the scammer then asks the MySpace user to register their e-mail and postal address before ‘receiving’ the Macy’s card. I can only assume that PromotionalPalace then does something else with that information but I don’t know what because I didn’t feel inclined to fill out these fields and register for this card.

At any rate, what happens from that point forward is of only mild interest to me. According to Wikipedia, some sort of Trojan Horse virus is placed on your computer but I don’t really know.

What is of real interest to me is that as far as I can tell, Macy’s hasn’t really responded to this situation. One blogger even went so far as to provide them with an analysis of the scam but so far, I haven’t read anything from them that addresses the scam.

In the words of the blogger who wrote the aforementioned report, “Macy’s brand has become a joke on MySpace.”

Whether or not that is true is up for debate, but what is not up for debate is that Macy’s really needs to get on this one because the longer this goes without any sort of response, the more damage there will be to their corporate reputation and their brand.

Adweek recently published a good recap. of the social marketing landscape that lays out the current brands active in the space, and several of the companies that are attempting to bring services to market that somehow leverage word-of-mouth.

The article does a good job representing the spectrum of approaches that social marketing agencies are taking to drum up buzz that in some ways mirror some very fundamental dichotomies that exist in public relations - is it better to instruct or influence - state or spin your message?

As Pete Blackshaw, CMO of Nielsen BuzzMetrics explains, “There are many things advertisers can do to influence the outcome, but there’s a high order of finesse and sensitivity needed.”

In traditional public relations, the repercussions for a bit of spin gone wrong are normally not that severe (provided the spin is mild). In social media however, there can be serious repercussions, which raises the stakes considerably for many of the companies that are focused on the space.

At any rate, I felt the article did a good job listing out some of the emerging social media services but I thought it might help to try and group them. Note - I parsed out social marketing services (those that are more focused on leveraging word-of-mouth) and focused primarily on social media services (those that are primarily online).

Here is how I see it playing out:

Bucket 1: Social media enabled services - These services are communications-oriented but have adapted to better integrate with the social media paradigm. PRWeb would fit into this category because the initial benefit proposition was about cutting through the media and communicating direct-to-consumer through news aggregators and search engines. Over time, the press releases have incorporated social media trappings like trackbacks, social bookmark links and other tools that recognize the growing importance of social media.

Bucket 2a: Social media oriented services (outreach) - These are the groups that have mortgaged the house and put all their chips in leveraging purely social media to create buzz. PayPerPost would be a prime example because it is entirely oriented around connecting brands with social media influencers. It has really been forged in the paradigm and oriented around creating buzz through social media but it is not entirely social media itself. In fact, it bears a greater resemblance to an advertising affiliate network than to a true open network. Collactive could also fall into this bucket.
Bucket 2b: Social media oriented services (monitoring) - I think conceptually, this bucket is probably very similar to bucket 2 except their primary goal is to collect and analyze data in social media. Radian6 and Relevant Noise would be good examples of this type of service.

Bucket 3: True social media services - I would say the third bucket of services are those that are oriented at impacting social media in some way, but can themselves be considered true forms of social media. The distinction is sort of hazy here, but I think the manner in which the user interfaces with the service will be fundamentally different than before. I think LinkedIn is a good example of the approach because it provides a very social media-driven approach to networking, but it is not really PR/Marketing consumed.

Over time, some of the services from the other buckets will evolve into this bucket; others will simply be new offerings in the market.