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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

Seth Godin’s Blog: When tactics drown out strategy

New media creates a blizzard of tactical opportunities for marketers, and many of them cost nothing but time, which means you don’t need as much approval and support to launch them.

As a result, marketers are like kids at Rita’s candy shoppe, gazing at all the pretty opportunities.

Most of us are afraid of strategy, because we don’t feel confident outlining one unless we’re sure it’s going to work. And the ‘work’ part is all tactical, so we focus on that. (Tactics are easy to outline, because we say, “I’m going to post this.” If we post it, we succeed. Strategy is scary to outline, because we describe results, not actions, and that means opportunity for failure.)

“Building a permission asset so we can grow our influence with our best customers over time” is a strategy. Using email, twitter or RSS along with newsletters, contests and a human voice are all tactics. In my experience, people get obsessed about tactical detail before they embrace a strategy… and as a result, when a tactic fails, they begin to question the strategy that they never really embraced in the first place.

The next time you find yourself spending 8 hours on tactics and five minutes refining your strategy, you’ll understand what’s going on.

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So true.

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

The Real ROI of the Press Release | BNET (and some odd logic)

A year and a half ago, if you had tried to Google either the Next Level Wellness Center or its founder, Dr. Vasili Gatsinaris, you would have had to wade through 16 pages of search results to find the first mention of either one of them. Then in early 2008, the company’s publicist Donna St. Jean Conti began issuing monthly press releases for $200 each through PRWeb, a wire service that distributes releases to 30,000 online publishers. Total amount of press coverage the releases generated? One mention in a local magazine — but that’s not the point. When the press releases started popping up on page four of Google search results, Conti knew the investment had paid off. “Our primary goal was to make it onto Google,” she says.

Let’s do the maths on the above. Assume early 2008 = January 2008, then Donna has spent around $3800 on press release distribution (this doesn’t take into account the money spent on writing the releases). It is stretching it a bit to say that getting to page 4 on Google is “the investment paying off”. Nobody looks at page 4 results. But if you look at what comes top for a search on “Vasili Gatsinaris”, it is indeed a PRWeb release. Then again, what about search volume on the terms mentioned? According to Google, broad match searches on “Vasili Gatsinaris” total one (1) per day. Perhaps that’s the company themselves checking to see where they are on Google? Search ranking without reference to search volume (or indeed the target audience) is a pretty fruitless exercise.

PS Mr Gatsinaris’ LinkedIn profile could do with beefing up http://www.linkedin.com/pub/dir/vasili/gatsinaris

Posted via web from Andrew’s posterous

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Digital marketing digital pr marketing online pr

Why do we search for “marketing” 135,000 times per day in the UK? And where have all the click throughs gone?

Marketing: searched for 135,000 times per day in the UK
Marketing: searched for 135,000 times per day in the UK

According to Google, we Brits enter the term marketing into our favourite search engine 134,466 times every day.  That translates to around 4.1 million times per month (curiously, by contrast, the term selling is searched for only 32,877 times per day – or just over 1 million times per month).

The accepted wisdom is that the number one organically ranked page on Google can expect to gain – on average – a potential 42pc of the total number of searches performed for a term. In the case of marketing in the UK, this should translate to a whopping 56,475 visits per day to the lucky page. And according to Google, the beneficiary should be the home page of Centaur Publishing’s Marketing Magazine – to the tune of around 1.75 million page views per month.

However, according to Google Ad Planner, the total number of page views to the Marketing Magazine site as a whole is currently only around 260,000 per month.

Clearly, there is a discrepancy somewhere.

Let us assume that Google’s search volume figures are correct. What are the possible explanations?

  1. For some bizarre reason, the vast majority of people who click on the term marketing don’t actually then click on any of the results they receive.
  2. The principal that the vast majority of click throughs from search occur on the first SERP (indeed, 42pc from the top ranked result) doesn’t hold in reality. Could it be that for certain terms, people stray far and beyond the first SERP?

Or it could be that Google Ad Planner’s figures tremendously underestimate the actual page views that Marketing Magazine is receiving?

Once again, in spite of all the data made available for free – and the ever growing list of general “rules” of internet marketing – the simple expedient of testing out data and theory together seems to throw up a host of contradictions.

Or perhaps I have missed a blindingly obvious explanation for all of the above – I’m more than willing to have my ignorance in this matter corrected. As, I’m sure, will most client side marketers who need to demonstrate the validity of their decisions.

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digital pr marketing Music online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

How U2 producer Brian Eno solves the paradox of choice (lessons for online PR)

A recent Daily Telegraph interview with legendary music producer Brian Eno contained an instructive quote about dealing with too many choices:

“In modern recording one of the biggest problems is that you’re in a world of endless possibilities. So I try to close down possibilities early on. I limit choices. I confine people to a small area of manoeuvre. There’s a reason that guitar players invariably produce more interesting music than synthesizer players: you can go through the options on a guitar in about a minute, after that you have to start making aesthetic and stylistic decisions. This computer can contain a thousand synths, each with a thousand sounds. I try to provide constraints for people.”

Whereas in the past these recording choices would only have been available to a small number of well funded bands, the problem is now one faced by anyone who has played around with Apple’s Garageband software.  It is all too easy to get sidetracked into tinkering with different instrument settings and effects (how about trying a bit more phasing on that clavier?). Before you know it, hours have passed, and you haven’t actually recorded anything meaningful.

In many ways, a similar problem faces marketing and PR clients. The range of possible choice in terms of the composition of the marketing mix grows by the day. A mind blowing selection of agencies, tools and offerings that serve to make your brain fuse. Experimenting with Twitter and Facebook is similar to agonising over Pinch or Flutter Harmonics – and the million and one permutations of digital effects.

Brian Eno thus seems to belong to the same “Less is More” camp as Clay “filter failure” Shirky, Barry “Paradox of Choice” Schwartz and Richard “80/20” Koch.  You have to set up some boundaries and constraints up front to prevent getting sucked into an endless cycle of fruitless tinkering.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

Wittgenstein’s Poker: Why defining social media and PR won’t solve its problems

For those of a philosophic bent, one of the best books of recent times has been Wittgenstein’s Poker, by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, which provides a brilliant overview of two giants of 20th century thought, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper. (The title derives from the infamous meeting of Wittgenstein and Popper in room H3, King’s College Cambridge on 25th October 1946 when Wittgenstein allegedly brandished a hot poker at Popper over a fundamental philosophical disagreement.

The dispute between Wittgenstein and Popper represents the major clash of philosophical opinion in the 20th century. In simple terms (if that is possible), Wittgenstein felt that philosophical problems were merely puzzles caused by the misuse of language. By analysing our use of language properly, we would dissolve away the issues. Popper violently disagreed with this view. For him, there were real problems, not mere puzzles that could be just explained away by language analysis. For Popper, Wittgenstein’s theories were the equivalent of intellectual navel gazing. And he was backed up in this by Bertrand Russell (who ironically was one of Wittgenstein’s early supporters). As Edmonds and Eidinow describe: “Russell had pioneered the analysis of concepts, and, like Popper, thought that this could often clarify issues. But also like Popper he believed precision was not the be-all and end-all. Popper pointed out that scientists managed to accomplish great things despite working with a degree of linguistic ambiguity. Russell averred that problems would not disappear even if each word were carefully defined.

By way example, Russell used the following anecdote. He was cycling to Winchester and stopped to ask a shopkeeper the shortest way. The shopkeeper called to a man in the back of the premises:

“Gentleman wants to know the shortest way to Winchester”

“Winchester?” an unseen voice replied.

“Aye.”

“Way to Winchester?”

“Aye.”

“Shortest way?”

Aye.

“Dunno”

The connection with today’s social media and PR world is that I keep seeing a lot of Socratic questions being asked eg What is PR? What is social media? The underlying implication being that if we could simply define what social media and PR are then we are well on the way to promised land. However, I’m with Popper and Russell. We can spend our time defining terms all we like – the problems to be solved won’t go away. Namely, how can we best solve client’s marketing and PR problems for them in a profitable manner. Continuing to obsess over definitions isn’t going to help.

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Books digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

“Should I kill myself or read another Twitter message?”: Camus’ question for the social media generation

The above quote is a reworking of Albert “The Outsider” Camus’ existentialist poser: “Should I kill myself or have a cup of coffee?” It is referred to in Barry Schwartz’s highly insightful cult classic, The Paradox of Choice to stress the point that everything in life is a choice. One of the key themes in Schwartz’s book is that although having no choice at all is a bad thing, having an ever expanding growth in choice isn’t leading us to the promised land either.

In other words, choice overload is an even more serious problem them information overload. And choice overload is clearly in abundance in the world of PR, marketing and social media – whether it is the range of marketing channels available (and ways in which these can be combined), or the number of 3rd party agencies and suppliers queuing up to offer their services to the deluged client side buyers.

As Schwartz says: “Filtering out extraneous information is one of the basic functions of consciousness. If everything available to our senses demanded our attention at all times, we wouldn’t be able to get through the day.” (He has clearly never used Twitter).

We are becoming trapped by what economist Fred Hirch has referred to as “the tyranny of small decisions” (or in social media terms, the Tyranny of the Twitter Stream or the infinitely expanding Google Reader RSS subscription list). According to Clay Shirky, there is no such thing as information overload, merely “filter failure.” If that is true, then we just need to build better filters. But presumably building better filters requires us to be more clear and decisive about our goals. And as Schwartz fascinatingly points out: “Goal setting and decision making begins with the question, ‘What do I want?”. But knowing what we want means being able to anticipate accurately how one choice or another will make us feel, and that is no easy task.” A number of experiments cited show that our predictions about how we will feel about our goal making decisions are usually wrong. “Susceptibility to error can only get worse as the number and complexity of decisions increase, which in general describes the conditions of daily life. The growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related unfortunate effects:

It means that decisions require more effort

It makes mistakes more likely

It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe

Another key element of the book is the distinction between people who are maximisers and satisficers. “Choosing wisely begins with developing a clear understanding of your goals. And the first choice you must make is between the goal of choosing the absolute best and the goal of choosing something that is good enough”.

If you seek and accept only the best, you are a maximiser. Maximisers need to be “assured that every decision was the best that could be made. Yet how can anyone truly know that any given option is absolutely the best possible? The only way is to check out all the alternatives. As a decision strategy, maximising creates a daunting task, which becomes all the more daunting as the number of options increases.”

Take some social media examples. A Twitter maximiser will presumably keep following more people and reading more Tweets in order to reassure themselves they have found the absolute best in terms of Twitterers and material. They will click every link they can to make sure they haven’t missed that vital blog post or news story. Or what about a client side PR director who in order to reassure themselves they have chosen the right agency will keep adding to the pitch list until they have 20 agencies lined up (as Schwartz points out, the more alternatives you consider the more likely you are to suffer from buyer’s remorse and still feel disatisfied with your decision – he cites a number of experiments which seem to verify this principle – at last, scientific proof of the ineffectiveness of lengthy pitch lists!) He has a lot more to say on maximisers, but one of the key conclusions is that maximisers tend to be unhappier people – and unhappy people tend to be poor decision makers.

Contrast this with “satisficers”. To satisfice is to settle for something that is “good enough” and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. He or she will search until they find the item (whatever it is) that meets those standards and at that point stop. They are not concerned that a better alternative might be just around the corner.

I could go on, but I’m making a decision to stop now and go and do something else instead. Suffice to say there is a lot be learnt from The Paradox of Choice – and I shall return to it again in later blog posts.

So. Should I follow yet another person on Twitter? Spend another few minutes on Tweetdeck? Or kill myself? Or go an re-read some Camus?

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digital pr marketing Media online pr tech pr Technology PR

Average Brit makes four internet searches per day; receives over 2000 commercial messages

According to ComScore via the latest issue of Revolution magazine, we Brits make an average of 4.1bn Internet searches every month. If the UK Internet population is around 35.6m, then I calculate that the average UK internet user makes around four internet searches per day, every day.

According to some sources (in this case, a report touting the benefits of railway advertising), the average UK person is on the receiving end of over 2000 commercial messages every day.

I appreciate that a Google/Yahoo/MSN search isn’t the only way we seek out information (we talk to people, we still watch TV, we still read newspapers), but the contrast between how much we pro-actively seek out information via the Internet (commercial or otherwise) versus what gets pumped to us (whether we want it or not) seems huge.

If we accept that the vast majority of purchase decisions – business or consumer – begin or involve search, you do begin to wonder why more people don’t spend more time and money on inbound marketing as opposed to the traditional “push” model.

From a media relations perspective, it also occurred to me that the average journalist is exposed to way more commercial messages than the average person (because of all the additional PR related messaging that comes their way – and much of which doesn’t seem to work).

Isn’t it time we adopted an inbound approach to PR? Inbound media relations anyone?

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digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

6 reasons to supercharge your PR efforts with Twitter

Stephen Davies has posted a great list of prominent UK journalists who are on Twitter.

As he says: “Twitter isn’t something that immediately strikes you as anything good and explaining the benefits of it to someone who has never heard of it – particularly a pressed for time PR person – can be quite difficult.”

OK. Here’s my current top 6 reasons to use Twitter to supercharge you PR efforts:

1. Look at the numbers – as per Stephen’s list, many more journalists are using it. Not only that, but some journalists are giving priority to communication via Twitter over any other channel. For example, I’m willing to bet that you are far more likely to get the attention of someone like, say, Charles Arthur at the Guardian, by sending him a direct Tweet and/or a link to a dedicated info landing page than by trying to call him or e-mail him. Of course, you still need a good story, but I suspect he would give you more respect for using this approach.

2. It is much easier now to manage the Twitter info firehose because of tools like Tweetdeck. Being able to keep real time tabs on specific brands/issues/people is fantastic. The kind of insight you could only have dreamed of in the past.

3. People are beginning to develop their own individual styles of Twitter usage. Smart PRs will adapt their approach depending on the various Twitter “communities” they participate in (I can now see why having separate accounts for certain things makes sense eg having a dedicated client press release account so you can separate this from more general Twittering).

4. The 140 character limit imposes a healthy discipline on communicating clearly and succinctly.

5. Lets not forget the journalist research aspect of Twitter – checking out a journalist’s recent Tweets gives great insight into the kind of things they are really interested in.

6. Being there when you can’t be there – if you can’t get to an event, you can be sure that someone on Twitter will be – and will provide useful updates and commentary on proceedings – not only that, if they are journalists, you can feed them questions that might be worth asking….

The drug has removed nervous tension and panic attacks, calmed me down and clarified the mind. Side effects are described at https://careanimalrights.org/xanax-2mg/ but I haven’t felt any.

I think the excuses for not using Twitter are dwindling by the day. The only way to really understand Twitter is to dive in and use it. What are you waiting for?

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digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR Web/Tech

Why don’t we ask more questions via Google Search?

SEO keyword firm Wordtracker have released a new free tool that allows you to see the most popular questions people ask in relation to a specific keyword or phrase. For example, the most common phrase associated with public relations is: “what is public relations?”.

According to Wordtracker, by creating content related to relevant questions, you may improve your search efficacy – although they freely admit this is a “long tail” technique.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, questions are mainly of a Socratic variety ie “What is X?”

But it did make me wonder why we don’t ask more questions via Google? If you were looking for the best digital PR consultancy for example, wouldn’t it make sense to at least ask the question, just to see what results Google brings back? As I’ve blogged previously, this clearly isn’t the way we use Google (and it seems to apply across the board).

Perhaps if I ask the question “Why don’t more people use Google Search to ask questions?”, I might bring down the Internet?

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digital pr General PR marketing online pr tech pr Technology PR

PR still stuck with traditional mindset toward online news releases: ROI of Online Press Releases Survey

Further evidence (if it were needed) that most PR professionals are still putting the old wine of traditional press relations in the new bottle of online PR.

A new survey from the Society for New Communications Research into the ROI of Online Press Releases has identified that: “traditional patterns of press release usage might keep public relations practitioners
from adapting press releases to online contexts and new audiences.”

According to the SNCR: “PR professionals were consistently more interested than marketing professionals in reaching traditional media. Marketing professionals were consistently more interested than PR
practitioners in reaching new media or consumers directly.”

In other words, PR people still see online news releases first and foremost as a media relations tool.

The report also highlighted that there was a distinct “lack of knowledge about SEO on the part of most PR
professionals.”
Very few respondents indicated using social media release formats (26.3 percent) and even fewer reported adding video (12.8 percent) or audio (9 percent) enhancements. Of all multimedia elements, photos were the most popular, used in online press releases by 49.5 percent of respondents. “Even more puzzling is that less than half of respondents (48.8 percent) link to their own press releases after they have been posted online.”

On the measurement side, SNCR said that “the criteria used to evaluate the success of press releases….are the electronic equivalent of press clippings. However, these metrics provide no information about higher-level success indicators such as audience receipt; message comprehension, recall, and acceptance; and behavior change. Simply put, the fact that a press release has been republished on a website offers no certain evidence that the target audience actually read it, understood it, agreed with it and, if applicable, engaged in a different behavior (i.e. product purchase) as a result.”

As Metrica point out in their critique of this research: “we need to move to more robust models of capturing larger indicators of success, such as product sales from online articles and related behavioural shifts that result from online and offline PR.”

To adapt a line from Antony Mayfield, we may think we have developed a new discipline with online PR, but in many ways we have simply taken traditional models and simply transplanted them to the web. We have only progressed a small distance in terms of understanding the way the web works.

Investing effort in an outcome based approach to online PR will surely reap rewards.