The main idea running through the book is that any online communication project you want to run will be just like organising a party or social gathering in the real world.

It’s [...]]]> I’ve been doing some more work on the second edition of my book recently, and an idea struck me.

The main idea running through the book is that any online communication project you want to run will be just like organising a party or social gathering in the real world.

It’s all set out in the first chapter, which you can read here, but I’m still surprised on a regular basis how well the analogy works time and again.

This time, I was thinking about hashtags on Twitter. I’ve blogged before about how they might not actually be that useful, but another element of skepticism about them cropped up the other day.

A client said they were looking to start their own hashtag, and my immediate reaction was to think ‘Why bother, no-one’s going to use it’. I couldn’t work out why this was my gut reaction though, until I thought back to that crossover between online and offline communication.

In essence, imagine trying to start the equivalent of a hashtag in the offline world.

It would be like welcoming your guests to a party with the following conversation;

You: “Hi, welcome to our party”
Them: “Thanks, I’ve brought a bottle of wine, shall I put it in the kitchen?”
You: “Great, do. Oh, and also, here’s a bit of paper with the word “#mypartyrocks’ on it. Would you mind using this word regularly during all your conversations here this evening?”
Them: “What?”
You: “Oh, don’t worry, I’ve been encouraging everyone else here to do the same as well”
Them: “You’re weird”
You: “#mypartyrocks!”

It’d be a pretty strange thing to ask people to do in real life right? So why do people think that they can manage it on Twitter?

Now, this is not to say that hashtags aren’t used, or new ones aren’t regularly created. But where they do work, they work because people are already talking about something, and develop a hashtag to help track the conversation.

The hashtag is secondary to the content.

So if you still want to see a hashtag for your campaign trending on Twitter, focus on the content first, then see what hashtag emerges once the campaign takes off.

I was setting out all of the different social media and digital marketing channels the client had been using for their customer engagement. As part of this, I wanted to write down some sort of baseline analysis of their [...]]]> I was writing a proposal for some work the other day, and an idea struck me.

I was setting out all of the different social media and digital marketing channels the client had been using for their customer engagement. As part of this, I wanted to write down some sort of baseline analysis of their results so far.

How well had they had been doing, what was working well, where they could do better, that sort of thing.

The thing was though, each different channel I was writing about used different words for their measurement metrics. Here’s a list of what I’m talking about;

• Facebook – Fans, Likes, Friends, Reach, Talking about, ‘Were here’

• Linkedin – Follower, Connection

• Youtube – Subscriber, Viewer, Commenter

• Twitter – Follower, Following, Retweeter

Those are just some of the different options for things to measure from just four social media platforms, and already some of the words I’m using make no sense. Is someone you follow really best called a following? Surely ‘Followee’ would be better?

What would have been really handy in all of this, and still would be, is one single word to describe all of the different types of person and interaction set out above. It’s hard to know what a definition of that word would be, but I think it might run something like;

” An individual that interacts with your content in some way through a digital channel”

So, what do you think? Is there a word out there already that I’m massively missing? Can you think of a good word to use to describe somebody who interacts with content, no matter what the channel, the content or the method of interaction?

If no-one comes up with anything better, I’d like to propose the word Nigel.

Purely on the grounds that it’s as good a name as any, and it would be quite amusing to read that a digital marketing campaign had attracted X number of Nigels over the last Y months.

So, let me know how you’d solve this problem with a better word, or I’m going to call you all Nigel from now on.

UPDATE: Forget Nigel, the most appropriate word is Colin, based on this amusing Tweet from Sky News yesterday.

Starting as little more than email lists accessible through a website, discussion forums steadily grew into more coherent online platforms in their own right, fuelled largely by the rise of [...]]]> Back in the days before the marketing world hailed social media as the new messiah, the biggest thing online was discussion forums.

Starting as little more than email lists accessible through a website, discussion forums steadily grew into more coherent online platforms in their own right, fuelled largely by the rise of broadband internet*.

Then ‘social media’ came along, and discussion forums by and large got left out of the digital marketing and online PR mix. Silly really, as discussion forums provided many of the same features as social media platforms, long before Facebook was even a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye.

So, if you’d be interested in using discussion forums for engaging customers in your messages, here are some words of advice…

Join Them

It may sound obvious, but to post on a discussion forum, 99% of the time you have to register with it**.

This means it’s harder to pretend to be someone else, and as a rule, if you’re ever found using fake profile information on a forum, the owners will ban you. Similarly, if you ever try to register more than one account on a forum, you will be found and banned as well, through built in forum tools like IP address cross referencing.

It’s in this area that a vast number of digital marketing people fall down when trying to use forums, thinking they can get away with pretending to be a genuine third party, keen to share news of this amazing new product they’ve found.

Tempting as this astroturfing may seem, it will always go wrong. Really.

Join In

Just as you can’t pretend to be someone else, you also can’t just register with a forum, post your message, then leave. Doing this is little more than spamming, and will invariably be treated as such.

Similarly, if you do want to post a link to something you’re promoting, you need to join in with a discussion about it too.

Discussion forums do what they say on the tin. They’re there for discussion, so if you want to share your messages on them, then you need to do so discursively. If you just post a promotional message and/or a link, you will be deleted as spam quicker than you can say green eggs and ham.

Courtesy Matters

Just as you have to join in with the discussion, you also have to stick to the house rules.

If you start promoting something, chances are there will be some people who will disagree with you, sometimes vehemently. Stay polite, welcome feedback, and above all else, learn from it.

The chance to hold long, involved conversations about a product is one of the ways discussion forums are far superior to social media platforms like Twitter for digital marketing, so make use of the opportunity!

Also when thinking of courtesy, remember that each forum will have one or more moderators, there to keep the conversation flowing, diffuse arguments and deleted spam. On many forums, if you do want to post something promotional, then you have to ask the permission of the forum moderators first, or your post will be deleted.

Moderators put in huge amounts of time and effort, generally for free, so they’re not likely to be best pleased if you try to take advantage of their hospitality and generosity for your own commercial gain.

As a rule, moderators never mind being asked, but they very much mind not being asked.

Take Your Time

Investing time is generally where so many digital marketers using discussion forums go wrong.

Perhaps because they sell their services to clients based on the number of forums they can target, many digital marketers register with dozens of forums, post their content, then move on to the next one, never returning to engage in any discussion they may have started.

This approach is entirely counter productive, not just because you will annoy more people than you engage, but you also lose out on one of the things that make discussion forums potentially so effective for digital marketing.

Discussion forums are generally quite niche communities, basing their discussions around specific areas of life, so if you can find the ones most relevant to what you’re marketing, then you can potentially target exactly the people you want to be reaching.

With this in mind, it’s far more effective to pick just a small handful of forums and cultivate them properly, than trying to share you message randomly across dozens of different forums.

Reputation Matters

One of the great draws of social media for digital marketing is the ability to capitalise on the power of personal recommendation. As a result, discussion forums are one of the richest places to seek these personal recommendations.

For example, a recommendation on Twitter, whilst good, may mean little to you. Following someone just takes a simple click, and you may know little else about the person, meaning you have little understanding of how worthwhile or genuine their recommendations are.

In contrast, posters on discussion forums get to know each other very well over time, and so have much more understanding of what makes that person tick, making their personal recommendations much better understood, more trustworthy and far more effective.

The thing is, to unlock this value, you need to build a good reputation on the forum yourself. Only posting occasionally or not joining in with discussions in a meaningful way will do little to boost your reputation, meaning the products and services you aim to recommend to others will likely be ignored.

I’ve been a member of various forums for over 10 years now, and have built a reputation to a degree that I know my recommendations will, where relevant to the reader, will be acted upon.

This comes back to my previous point too, that it’s worth investing the time to join in with a particular discussion community, both to understand what messages the community reacts well to, and to build your reputation to the degree that your recommendations will have an impact.

Conclusion

So from these four points, I hope I’ve helped you understand how digital marketing through discussion forums works, and how you can get it right when hundreds of other people are getting it so very wrong on a daily basis.

It’s about quality not quantity, it takes time and careful consideration of your audiences, and above all else it requires authenticity in who you are, what you say and how you say it.

If you have found it useful, feel free to recommend this post on your favourite discussion forums.

Wait, you’ve not a member of any?

Go join one now!

********************

* Back in the days of ‘pay per minute’ dialup Internet access, many people preferred email discussion lists, as they could download all of the discussions in one go, write replies offline, then hop back online just to send them.

** 4Chan is one of the only forums that allows unregistered anonymous posting, and you don’t want to try to market your product or service on there. Trust me.

The initial question was;

“What if a company doesn’t have a PR professional to help them with press releases? Is it OK for the company to create their own press release and submit it to the [...]]]>

This is no longer your target audience…

There was an interesting discussion on Linkedin recently, which I thought I’d share my thoughts about here too.

The initial question was;

“What if a company doesn’t have a PR professional to help them with press releases? Is it OK for the company to create their own press release and submit it to the writers of print and online?”

At first I didn’t bother reading the thread, as it seemed the answer was obvious.

Of course it’s ok for a company to write their own press releases without using a PR professional.

Surely?

Well, it seems I’m in the minority here. The majority of the thread was filled with people saying that you absolutely need to use a PR professional to write your press releases, and if you don’t you’ll never get anywhere.

The first thing that struck me about the comments was the implicit assumption that press releases are what go to journalists. However, thanks to the Internet, journalists are no longer the main intermediaries between your message and your target audiences. The fact that people were talking about ‘press’ releases rather than media releases is informative I think.

In fact, with newspaper circulation falling steadily, I’m not sure I’d even recommend sending every story to journalists as standard anymore. You’ve got your networks, your audience’s networks, blogs and citizen journalists to think of first. If a story grows legs online, traditional journalists will then pick it up anyway.

I’ve been on the receiving end of a lot of press releases as a well read blogger over the years, and I have to say that from this experience, professional PR people invariably seem to be the worst at trying to get stories covered online. Their style may work for journalists, but their ability to engage non-professional writing outlets is often genuinely cringeworthy.

PROTIP:

Someone may be writing a blog.

You may think that is cool.

It doesn’t mean you have to address them like an edgy teenager or try to act like you’re down with the kids.

I suspect a lot of the reason professionals nowadays see results from targeting journalists is because journalists have a set amount of copy to file each day, often with redundancy looming over them, and so are very grateful for the content.

Other online news sources have no such issues, and so generally the professional approach falls flat on its face.

Everyone seems to accept that the Internet has made mass publishing freely available to all. However, people still seem reluctant to admit that this has had effects on the other side of the process too. If everyone can be a writer these days, everyone can write a media release to send to other writers.

It really is a no brainer, in more ways than one.


Photo by Newspaper Club on Flickr

However, through the [...]]]> As some of you will know, last year I started the Bristol Democracy Project, aimed at getting more people in Bristol involved in decision making. The main project’s been fallow for a while as I’ve concentrated on other ideas that sprang out of it, like Bristol Blogs.

However, through the project I got to know a great Citizen Journalism project being run at the Watershed in Bristol, and I’ve just built their new website, titled ‘Bristol Mayor Watch‘.

The project had previously been using a Posterous blog, but had been toying with the idea of moving to WordPress for a while, so when Posterous announced it was closing down, they made the leap.

Here’s a screenshot of the site, taken today.

Design wise, they wanted to keep it looking like the Posterous blog they had previously, with a ‘posts as boxes’ WordPress theme. It took a bit of searching, but I found one in the end, and happily it cost nothing to use.

The site’s pretty simple at this stage, as a lot of the work went into the admin side of it. One of the big requirements of the site was to enable true citizen journalism by allowing multiple authors to post text, images, video and audio directly into the site via email using their smartphones.

Happily a combination of WordPress plugins were on hand to enable all of this, and the site was first used successfully last Thursday to report live from some candidate hustings for the forthcoming Bristol City Council elections.

To go with the site, I also ran an hour’s training session for the citizen journalists on how to use social media for public engagement, which was great fun. You can read more about that here.

So, a worthwhile, tidy and defined online public engagement project, featuring consultancy with some technical work too.

More of the same please!

There’s been talk for a while now of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook putting some money behind political campaigns in the USA. After all, when you’re one of the world’s richest men, the temptation to change the world with [...]]]> This popped up on my Facebook feed the other day, and it surprised me.

There’s been talk for a while now of Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook putting some money behind political campaigns in the USA. After all, when you’re one of the world’s richest men, the temptation to change the world with that money must be vast.

The problem seems to be though, as the above screenshot shows, once you move out of a world where people just want to click ‘like’, and into a world of politics, everything can become a bit messy.

I’m sure Facebook aren’t actively trying to be evil with any of what they’re doing, and this article certainly adds some useful context about the political reasons for funding the campaigns they are doing.

Still though, it doesn’t take much for ‘Group including Mark Zuckerberg funds campaign some people disagree with’ to turn into ‘Facebook is funding evil, boycott it!’.

For all Facebook seems dominant, remember that Myspace used to seem dominant too. With Facebook already having lost two million monthly users in the UK over the last six months, perhaps Facebook would do well to bear in mind the words of Enoch Powell.

“All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of human affairs.”

However, time and again I keep seeing these attempts at offline to online conversion being done [...]]]> It’s always tempting to publish in the offline world the URLs of campaigns you’re running. You can reach people in all of the places where their computer isn’t, but still gain from the many benefits of engaging them online.

However, time and again I keep seeing these attempts at offline to online conversion being done less well than they could have been.

Here are two examples of this I’ve seen recently, along with thoughts on how they could have been improved.

First, there’s this roadsign from South Gloucestershire Council, promoting a consultation on an experimental road closure. It looks nice, but there are a few problems with it.

First, the URL is partly obscured by the screws in the sign itself. Unintentional certainly, but something that could easily have been checked with the designers beforehand. Given people are going to be reading this whilst driving past at speed, this sign needs all the clarity it can get.

However, even assuming people can read the URL in the split seconds they have to look at it, there’s a bigger problem here, in that the URL doesn’t actually take you to the consultation itself.

Instead, it takes you to the list of all consultations being run in South Gloucestershire, leaving you to search for this specific consultation when you get there. It’s an extra step added in the process, and it’ll cause drop offs in participation.

Why not create a specific URL for this consultation, one that then redirects to the consultation page itself?

Second, there’s this URL on a bus ticket from First Bus at the moment.

Whilst it’s great that First are promoting opportunities to get involved on their tickets, is that really the best URL they could have used for it?

Again, something shorter and more memorable is far more likely to be typed into a browser by someone.

Both of these instances also share a common problem as well.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I find the opportunity provided by publishing URLs offline really exciting. The actions people take after reading printed media are notoriously hard to measure, but by printing a URL, you have a perfect thing to measure; how many people visit that URL.

The thing is, both of the above examples use a generic URL, rather than one specific to the medium. If each URL was unique to roadsigns or tickets, and then redirected to the main URL, you’d easily be able to track how many people take action on the basis of reading a printed URL. You could even split test your messaging to see which calls to action work best.

Using the same URL on printed media as you use elsewhere on the web seems like a real missed opportunity, and one that’s very easy to fix.

So next time you want to print a URL on something, here’s a small checklist for you;

• Is the URL as short as it can be?
• Is the URL memorable and easy to spell?
• Is the URL unique to the media it is printed on?
• Does the URL redirect automatically to your final intended target page?
• Can you track these redirects?

Start getting these right, and you can start to build a really good picture of what works for your target audiences when it comes to converting offline interest to online activity.

For those new to this, the idea behind the bill was to introduce some form of statutory legislation around the press in the UK, inspired [...]]]> About a month ago, I was blogging here, here and here about how the Government’s new Crime and Courts bill might affect bloggers.

For those new to this, the idea behind the bill was to introduce some form of statutory legislation around the press in the UK, inspired by, if not based on, the findings of the Leveson Enquiry.

However, in amongst this, it rolled up bloggers into its definition of the media, potentially putting thousands of business and social bloggers at risk of paying ‘exemplary damages’ if they didn’t sign up to the new scheme.

It did look hopeful for a while that an amendment in the House of Lords would have removed this problem. However, the Lords’ amendment has been rejected by the government, and replaced by this amendment instead.

In essence, it exempts blogs that employ fewer than 10 staff or have a turnover of less the £2 million per year.

Perhaps as a sign that some people with knowledge of the digital sector have now been involved in shaping this law, the DCMS has provided this handy infographic for who will and won’t be affected by the new regulations.

(taken from the DCMS on Flickr)

Seems this blog, and yours, can breathe safely. For now at least.

I went to an interesting Jamie Catto workshop this weekend, that got me thinking back to my recent idea around the [...]]]> Read part 1 of ‘The Big You’ here.
Read part 2 of ‘The Big You’ here.
Read part 3 of ‘The Big You’ here.

I went to an interesting Jamie Catto workshop this weekend, that got me thinking back to my recent idea around the ‘Big You’ in Social Media.

Amongst other things, Jamie pointed out that from an early age, we’re all conditioned to be addicted to approval.

Do something wrong as a kid, and you get told off. Do something right, and you’re rewarded with approval. So you do more things to gain approval, and the hold the approval of others has over you gets stronger.

For one real life example of this, he suggested Facebook. Think for a minute about how that platforms is entirely designed to feed us the approval we crave. Post content, people click like. Post more content, you get more likes, and your sense of approval grows. Of course, likes on Facebook are meaningless in the real world*, but they’ve clearly tapped into something there, growing to become a massive global approval mechanism.

Jamie’s point was that to do our most interesting and creative work, we need to get away from this need for approval, do something genuinely new, and do it because you believe in it, not because others will approve of it (although it’s nice if they do).

This got me thinking back to the idea of the ‘Big You’. The problem with the ‘Big You’ is that it’s all about you, not about others. With the idea of us all being addicted to approval though, you can see why it happens.

Like the example I cited about PR agencies only tweeting about how great their work is, most people on social media are putting content out there that aims to increase the amount of approval they receive from others.

Two things strike me about this. First, it’s a misunderstanding of what will gain you approval from others. You’re far more likely to gain approval from others by talking about what they are doing, than you are from talking about yourself.

Second though, think about your best work, your most creative thoughts, your biggest innovations. Are they ones that came from following a well trodden path, copying the work of others, or are they the pieces of work where you took risks, did something different, and added something new to the sum of human knowledge?

I’d bet they’re the latter, and you’re not going to do more of them if the main thing you seek is the approval of others.

As Henry Ford said about inventing the Motor Car;

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

So in all of this, I’m hoping to encourage you to see Social Media as something genuinely social, something where you share the work of others and your opinions on it, and more important, where you share yourself too.

Not the version of you that seeks approval, or the version of you that shies away from criticism, but the version of you you believe in. Do that, and you’ll be standing on the shoulders of giants, and in the process, I bet you’ll get that approval itch scratched too.

* Just look at how often businesses boast of how many likes they have on their Facebook page. Does each of those likes translate into sales? Of course not, it’s actions on Facebook that you need, not likes.

To be on the receiving end of spam and nuisance calls, the people [...]]]> For some of you, this post will be stareingly obvious, but a couple of conversations recently have made me realise that not everyone knows these two handy tricks for reducing spam and nuisance calls, so I thought I’d share them here.

To be on the receiving end of spam and nuisance calls, the people bothering you have to get hold of your email address or phone number. So far, so obvious.

For the last few years though, I’ve been running occasional tests on how these people get hold of your details, and come to the conclusion that a big part of the problem is registering with websites.

More and more sites these days ask you to register with them in some way. Want access to some of their content? You have to give them your details. Want to receive notifications of their news? You have to register? Want to buy something from them online? You definitely have to register.

I’ve no problem with this in principle, but some sites are really lazy with it. Rather than just asking you for the details they actually need to know, they ask you for everything; your address, home phone number, mobile number, email address and all the rest. Often these are required fields, meaning you just can’t get what you want without handing over all of your information.

Many of these sites hold your data securely, and use it responsibly, but many don’t. The temptation to sell on contact lists for money must be large once you build up a big list, and the chances of being caught doing it are slim. Alternatively, it’s not tricky for spammers to exploit a site with poor security, either by pulling data out of the site, or intercepting it on its path from your computer to the site’s servers.

Having tested it, I’m certain that this is what is happening with a certain proportion of sites out there, although I haven’t the time to work out exactly which ones. But how do you use these sites without putting yourself at risk of spam?

Well, there are two easy fixes. For phone numbers, no site will run a check of the number you enter against a list of real phone numbers anywhere, it’s just not practicable. So all they do is run a simple validation on the phone number field, making sure what is entered is numbers not letters, and sometimes checking that the number follows an expected format for what is asked (UK landlines numbers begin in ’01′, ’02′ or ’03′, mobile numbers in ’07′.)

So, if you want to fill in an online form but not hand over your number, why not just enter 01234 567890? I’ve checked and it’s not a real phone number in use by anyone.

Similarly, for emails, there’s a domain name that has been reserved to be used as a fake domain, and to which any emails sent will be automatically deleted. The domain is www.example.com, and you can read more about it here. So, if you don’t want to handover your email address, just use ‘anything@example.com’, and you’re sorted.

So there you go, two generic and fake pieces of data you can use online when you want to reduce the risk of receiving spam or nuisance calls. I hope they’re of use.