Archive for the ‘Social Media Tactics’ Category

We often work with startups in “stealth mode,” who want to maintain their IP and ensure they are able to get out the door to the wider world — but, on their terms.  After all, you only get one launch.

This is inordinately important to entrepreneurs who have poured everything into their projects.   They want to makes sure everything is just right.

However, the days of secret launches are harder and harder to achieve. The nature of Social Media means anything with a high interest level is harder to keep under wraps, and once it’s out, well … you know the rest.

This was the challenge presented to us by Book of Odds.

Ever ask yourself “what are the odds?”  Book of Odds exists to answer that question, while giving that answer meaning through correlating it to something easy to understand.   For example, with all the Tiger Woods news, you might wonder the odds that a married or cohabiting man has cheated during the relationship (1 in 4.76!) … The odds we face in everyday life are fascinating, and thanks to Book of Odds founders Amram Shapiro, Louise Firth Campbell & Co., now they’re also searchable and tweetable!

Being rigorous researchers, Amram and Louise were diligent about understanding how SHIFT planned to drive interest and traffic, ensuring the company was seen as both credible and entertaining.  Developing a strategy that brought key audience influencers into the mix was exciting — but what if word got out beyond the select few we invited?

SHIFT’s take — “that’s actually the point.”  Let the influencers “do their job” of influencing their own select networks … but rather than target “the usual suspects” we performed research on the leading lights in key verticals, e.g., education and health, enabling Book of Odds to custom-invite these brainiacs to an exclusive private beta that was targeted, relevant and interesting.   These first invitees were, indeed, likely to want to spread the word, and they were encouraged to offer the pre-launch log-in codes to their circle of friends.

Again, even as the outreach expanded beyond the Big Brains into more media-centric circles, it didn’t just mean “traditional media” — i.e., the Freakanomics blog of the New York Times and a local Web Innovation event audience were among the first folks to be invited to the sneak peak.  Both subsequently asked to be able to widely share the log-in info with their readers and members, all prior to the “formal launch.”

During this period Book of Odds also commenced tweeting about different odds related to daily events.  Even though the site was inaccessible to the general public, we wanted to seed the larger audience with some compelling tidbits (after all, traffic is crucial to this type of site).

The duality of this approach  — full access to a highly select group of scrupulously researched influencers alongside sneak-peeks of relevant data to the masses  — gave Book of Odds a fair bit of credibility when SHIFT made its push to the larger world on the formal launch date.

Thus we enticed a broad swath of visitors that the company would never have reached if it remained in “stealth mode” until the Big Launch Day.

Launch week itself saw over 120 articles, including brand names such as WSJ, Howard Stern (Sirius Radio), Fast Company, Mashable and NPR.  The launch day also found Book of Odds the 12th most-searched term on Google!

Fast forward 2+ months and through the consistent feeding and customizing of odds-related material to a wide assortment of websites, radio and broadcast outlets, Book of Odds now consistently ranks in the top 5 organic results when searching for “odds” on Google — a huge win for a company whose main objective is to be the authoritative resource for anything odds-related.

Unfortunately you can’t search their website for “Odds of a Successful Company Launch,” but we like to think that this particular approach increased the chance of success for the Book of Odds!

By the way — in case you haven’t clicked the Book of Odds link yet, I assure you — it’s fun.  Collect the odds that describe you, create lists, calibrate your own risks, etc. For example, did you know that the risks of dying in January are 1 in 10.89 — the highest of any other month?  Be careful next time you grab that snow shovel!

We’re often asked, “Are you a PR agency or a Social Media agency?”  We suggest that that’s immaterial.  We do both.  The disciplines are merging.  SHIFT offers a hybrid approach in which a Facebook Group Admin is treated with the same respect and thoughtfulness as a New York Times reporter.  It makes a difference.

How about a case study to illustrate how “PR” and “Social Media” can work in tandem?

On June 23, 2009, online homegoods service Alice.com officially went live — and before long ranked as among one of SHIFT’s favorite and most successful launches.

Alice.com is the fourth start-up cofounders Marc McGuire and Brian Wiegand created together.  Having had great success with their last venture, Jellyfish.com — which sold to Microsoft after little more than a year — we determined to make Alice.com an even greater triumph for the young entrepreneurs.

Adopting the Forrester POST Methodology for our planning purposes, SHIFT first advised McGuire and Wiegand to build a community of loyalists; in this case, we all agreed to target mom- and frugal bloggers, whose input during the pre-launch phase would help bring improvements, attention and grassroots credibility to the service.

Understanding the reach and influence mombloggers have achieved over the past few years, SHIFT worked with our internal Alice.com contact, the inimitable Rebecca Thorman (@modite), to send invitations to several pre-identified bloggers, offering early trial of the site and inviting honest feedback.

The Alice team also offered extra discounts and coupons to select bloggers, so they could extend incentives to their readers to try the service.

Finally, SHIFT consulted on a series of contests and giveaways via Twitter, which continued on a weekly basis.

On the traditional media front, SHIFT accompanied the Alice co-founders on a press tour the week before the launch, briefing tier-one targets such the New York Times, BusinessWeek, Financial Times and Reuters. The journalists published their stories the day of the launch, along with hundreds of blogger loyalists — causing a media storm online, in print, in blogs, and on Twitter.

In one week, Alice received 110 pieces of unique coverage and nearly 70,000 tweets.  As of this writing, Alice also garnered nearly 70 broadcast hits in local markets such as CBS Boston, NBC Phoenix and ABC Philadelphia.  Better yet, national broadcast coverage included segments on CNN, the TODAY Show and Rachael Ray!

In early June, the pre-launch Alice.com site had 170,000 site visits — before anyone could even use the service.  At launch time in July, Alice.com’s traffic jumped to nearly 400,000 site visits.  Today, according to Compete.com, Alice.com boasted over 2.5M visits as of October 2009.

Alice does not invest in advertising — this was all grassroots Social Media and PR efforts, operating in tandem against a carefully orchestrated plan.

Note how the shape of this launch mapped to the Awareness Scale discussed last month.  A grassroots Social Media effort significantly boosted — and subsequently amplified — the success of the mainstream media effort, which fed back into the netroots.  Moving into the future, as revenues and strategy allow, Alice.com might consider an advertising strategy to solidify and defend their lead in consumers’ minds.

It’s not either PR or Social Media or Advertising.  It’s a continuum.  It’s all of the above.  It’s about “force multipliers.”  The successful plan requires a host of partners, skillsets — and of course, savvy and trusting clients like the folks at Alice.com.

P.S. – If one of the folks on your Xmas list is always complaining about making yet another trip to pick up something at Target, etc., letting them know about a free Alice.com account might be the best gift you could give!

You saw that blog post title and got all excited, right?  Thinking you’ll get the answer if you keep reading?

Sorry to disappoint you, but that’s not happening in this post.  However, I would be happy to talk to you about how to use PR for Inbound Marketing — using techniques such as blogging, social media and SEO to get more leads — next week.  All you need to do is register for Hubspot’s Inbound Marketing University (IMU).  Bonus?  This session also includes my friend Laura “Pistachio” Fitton, discussing “Twitter for Business.”  She’s wicked smaht, as we say in Boston.

IMU is a free marketing retraining program for marketing professionals — as well as marketers between jobs — looking to gain new skills to get ahead in the competitive workforce.  (Intrigued?  Check out any of the previous 11 IMU webinars.)

So far Hubspot has provided 13,000 hours of free class time, with 1,000 people applying for a certification exam at the end of the classes.  There are now 500 Inbound Marketing Certified Professionals around the world.

Disclosure: Hubspot is a former SHIFT client, and we (obviously) maintain a close relationship.  Definitely one of our more fun & exciting client launches!

How can corporate employees’ participation in Social Media be dealt with and managed in a way that liberates them — without putting the company at risk?

While I most often write about Social Media for Marketing, this question of Social Media use within the Corporation is ultimately a much bigger issue.

I’ve seen (and helped develop) several Social Media Usage Policies.  Meanwhile, folks like Dave Fleet have done an outstanding job of covering Social Media Policies at a philosophical level.

But, you’re busy.  You want the work done for you, eh?  I get it.

One of our new clients (an iconic brand that I can’t wait to tell you about!) recently worked on a new Social Media Policy which we helped to refine and humanize.  It represents one of the best examples I’ve seen, and offers the added benefit of having been vetted by top corporate lawyers.

And, you can have it.  Here, for you — for free and without copyright restrictions — is an example of the Top 10 Guidelines of Corporate Social Media Policy (PDF).

Copy & paste as you see fit, for your own company or clients: there may be some stuff that doesn’t fly within your own organization, but, this document is worth running up the flagpole with your company’s legal eagles, with the C-suite execs, etc.

As always you are encouraged to use this content with or without attribution to me or SHIFT.  Make it your own.

Just let me know if you find it useful?

The folks within Forrester Research’s Groundswell team have done an amazing job of describing the “social technographic” profiles of Internet users, slotting users into categories such as Joiners, Spectators, etc.  I frequently turn to their research as a reality check.

However, for my purposes in PR, even simpler definitions can often apply.  I tend to think of our clients’ “target audiences” in terms of Passionates, Influencers and Ad-Hocs.

Passionates are people who care deeply about topics that are too niche to impact the mainstream zeitgeist. But within those areas of interest, they are acknowledged, respected, and taken seriously — even if their audiences are relatively small.  These are often “the original bloggers.”  Folks who care enough to create.

Influencers are people who have large groups of followers, across different online strata.  They almost always started out as Passionates but have “crossed over” into a more mainstream role.  They are the tastemakers.  Sometimes they are part of the modern media but this is actually fairly rare.  The authority that an Influencer gained (while still a Passionate) has eclipsed traditional media’s credibility.

Ad-Hocs are everyday folks.  They deserve attention, too — though that is very hard to scale.  By being patient and proactive with as many folks as possible, a brand marketer gains grassroots respect that is eventually noticed by bigger fish.  (By contrast, when you only pay attention to a select group, that gets noticed, too.  In a bad way.)

If you try to cross-reference these three user types against Forrester’s definitions, you realize that most all are Creators, Critics and Joiners.  Some Ad-Hocs no doubt normally fall into the Spectator category but some event has caused them to make the leap into creation/criticism (otherwise, we’d never know about them).

It’s relatively simple, from a technological standpoint, to determine who is a Passionate, an Influencer or an Ad-Hoc.

First of all, 95% of the online population are Ad-Hocs.  Jane & Joe Mouseclick.  The Influencers, of course, are already well known.  The Passionates are a li’l trickier to track down, but tools ranging from Technorati to Radian6, etc., can simplify the process.  Just takes time and manpower.  A worthwhile endeavor.

From a PROCESS standpoint — well, every case is different but we typically counsel clients to:

a) Pay attention to the Ad-Hocs immediately, ubiquitously, forever;

b) Seek out and engage the Passionates; then, when you’re ready,

c) Approach the Influencers.

The Ad-Hocs should be buzzing about you in a nice way to give you the street cred to say hello to the Passionates — who are particularly wary of marketers.  Win them over and you’ll have staunch defenders online, as well as a better-defined path to the Influencer communities.

This greatly simplifies the approach, of course, but as a basic tenet of outreach it holds up well.

What do you think?  Too darned simple?  Got a better way to describe the approach?  Got a better graphic you’ve been using?  Lemme hear from you!