The debate over PR spam emails continues
Posted on February 22nd, 2010HJ Heinz Wasn’t Listening. Are You? How to Set Up a Real-time Twitter Monitoring System Today – Twitter PR strategies
Posted on February 19th, 2010Earlier this week, Advertising Age featured an article by Michael Werch titled My Life as H.J. Heinz: Confessions of a Real-Life Twitter Squatter.
In late 2009, Wertz created a H.J. Heinz, yes the ketchup company, twitter account and proceeded to twitter on behalf of Heinz – links to recipes, bits of history about the company. He followed people in Pittsburgh, Heinz’s hometown, and people who included the word “Heinz” in their tweets, and he started to build a following.
And, oh yeah, he was never authorized by Heinz to create a Twitter account or to tweet on their behalf. After two weeks, Wertz logged into Twitter and found his account changed from @HJ_Heinz to @notHJ_Heinz. Today, if you’re curious and try to find the @HJ_Heinz account, they’ve protected their tweets. What?
Some might read my headline above and think it’s misleading. They were listening and they responded. “They contacted Twitter and had this yahoo booted after two weeks.” Two weeks? Time in social media is measured in dog years. Two weeks is the equivalent of about 6 months.
I’m curious. If Wertz had been tweeting links to unsanitary uses of ketchup, would Heinz have responded faster?
Yes, someone at Heinz was listening, despite their slow response. But, what if you’re working at a company that can’t afford a social media monitoring dashboard? What if you’re a small, locally-owned business that wants to make sure you know what people are saying about your business online, yet you don’t want to spend hours each day manually doing searches on Twitter to monitor the conversation.
Learning how to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system isn’t new. Chris Brogan wrote about in January 2009, and you should definitely check out his article. But, technology changes, and I have some updates to Brogan’s great suggestions.
How to set up a real-time Twitter monitoring system:
1. Go to Twitter Search.
2. Search on your business name.
3. On the results page of your Twitter search, notice the orange RSS button in the upper right hand corner of the page with the text, “Feed for this query.” Click on that button.
4. Copy and paste the RSS feed URL, and then go to Feed My Inbox, and subscribe to that feed. For $5 per month, you can subscribe to 25 feeds and get real-time feed updates. If you choose that option, you will get an email, in real-time, each time your business name shows up in Twitter. If real-time updates overwhelm you, you can easily change them to once-a-day updates.
5. Go back to step 1, and create a new feed with the name of your town, the type of business you’re in, (Mexican restaurant, plumber) combined with another word, “hates, crap, love, wonderful, question, recommend” and you can create multiple feeds, each one of them subscribed to via Feed My Inbox.
6. As Chris Brogan pointed out, you can use this type of system in a variety of online monitoring tools, including Google Alerts, Icerocket (for monitoring blog conversations), etc.
Are you monitoring the Twitter conversation about your company and your local industry? Can you afford not to?
Photo credit – Nick Fraser
Training for the Olympics – how does your digital marketing efforts stack up?
Posted on February 18th, 2010The Winter Olympics are in full swing in Vancouver. As I’ve watched some of the world-class Olympic athletes compete, I started thinking about the training regimes of superstar athletes.
Jerry Rice, the famed wide receiver for the San Francisco 49ers, rarely took a day off in the offseason. He spent every offseason training – and training hard. Rice’s off-season workouts included two hours of cardiovascular running in the morning and three hours of strength training and weight lifting in the afternoon. His early-morning runs included a 5-mile uphill, vertical run. Then, at the summit, he’d throw in ten 40-meter uphill sprints.
You can take a look at the workout routines of other top athletes here.
How does your day-to-day work look in comparison to Rice and other stellar athletes?
If you’re working in digital marketing, PR, email marketing, SEO, paid search, what are you doing to train yourself to improve?
If you’re intent on being a world class marketer, a rock star, here are some things you could consider:
Time – are you punching a clock? Though you work in digital marketing, are you working bankers’ hours? I have two small kids, so I’m all about work-life balance. But, maybe you should consider setting aside a 1 or 2 week period in the next few weeks, work out logistics with your spouse/boyfriend/girlfriend, and work a series of 12-16 hours days for 1-2 weeks straight.
You can quickly do your “job” during those days, and then spend the other time throughout the day training and studying. If you’re in PR, what do your media lists and contact databases look like? Do you have a thorough list of the top bloggers covering your space. Have you emailed or tweeted them? Take your extra work time and start building those relationships.
Read – how many books did you read last year, last month, last week? And don’t just read Chris Brogan, David Meerman Scott, and Tamar Weinberg.
At the end of the day, most of us are in business. Sure, the tools have changed, but the basics of business haven’t changed all that much. Have you read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t, The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life
If you don’t think you have the time to read, first turn off the television, and then read this article by Julien Smith about how he read a book a week last year.
Analytics – sure, you’re intent on social media outreach, you’ve just finished a very successfull PR campaign for a client that resulted in a bunch of press coverage, your SEO is rocking and you’re killing your important keywords in Google’s SERPs. But, what is all that success doing for your bottom line? How many new leads have you generated.
Spend your extra-work week digging into the analytics of your site, and start getting answers to those questions. Read and study Avinash Kaushik.
Maybe you’ll discover that yes, you’re successfully driving traffic, but that traffic has terrible conversion. Analytics can give you answers to many of those questions, and you can begin testing new landing pages, conducting A/B testing, and figure out how to convert the traffic that is hitting your site every day.
Podcasts – You could spend some of your training time listening to podcasts. If you haven’t listened to Marketing Over Coffee yet, that should be your first stop. John and Chris’ podcast is filled with useful, actionable knowledge that you can start applying to your site and your marketing efforts immediately. And, there are plenty of other podcasts, that can educate and broaden your thinking about what you’re doing every day. 10 Golden Rules of Internet Marketing, Jaffe Juice, For Immediate Release, Six Pixels of Separation, are just a few to get you started.
So what’s your digital marketing training regime look like? Are you the next Jerry Rice in the making?
Local event digital marketing, search engine optimization, PR – Festival of the Hills case study
Posted on February 17th, 2010For the last several years, I’ve volunteered to handle PR/marketing for a local fall festival in my town – the Conway, Massachusetts Festival of the Hills.
The first year, I spent the majority of my time focusing on traditional PR efforts – contacting local newspapers, radio, TV – for calendar listings, pre-event press coverage, and day-of press coverage. I also worked on traditional advertising/marketing – running print ads in local newspapers and weeklies.
We had a lot of success that first year. The festival has been a local institution for many years, so the local media is definitely interested in covering the event each year.
However, last year, I decided to ramp up our digital marketing efforts. Here’s what we’ve done so far:
Website – launched the Festival of the Hills website – with design/coding help from Erica Goleman. Now, I need to work on SEO for the site. I just noticed when I googled the phrase Festival of the Hills we’re 6th in Google’s organic search results. Yes, there are other Festivals around the U.S. named the Festival of the Hills, but I know we can rank higher than # 6.
Twitter – I started a Twitter account for the festival. I researched local Twitter users and started following them. But, honestly, I don’t think the Twitter account worked all that great. The problem I ran into was Twittering about a local event. What do you Twitter about? Ultimately, since this was a volunteer project after all and I didn’t have a ton of time to develop a full-fledged Twitter persona, I ended up Twittering basic even info reminders – with links to the website. Not great, but we did get some retweets out of it.
This year I’m considering live Tweeting throughout the day of the Festival, and again doing some Tweeting of event info prior to the event.
Flickr pool – As part of the website, we set up a Flickr pool for people to tag photos of the Festival that they uploaded to Flickr.
Event websites – I created event pages for the Festival on both Eventbrite and Eventful. My thinking was to create these event pages to help with SEO and to offer another place online that someone could discover the Festival. Also, I like Eventful’s weekly email newsletters. You can sign up to receive info on certain types of events in your local area – music concerts, arts, kids and family activities. As a parent, I’ve discovered a few kids activities vai Eventful’s weekly e-newsletters that I didn’t know about before.
I wish more events and people used Eventul. I like the concept of Eventful “pushing” info on events that they think I’ll be interested in. And, that beats having to subscribe to a million different e-newsletters from local concert venues, museums, etc. But, I still don’t think Eventful is as robust as it could be on capturing all the great local events in our area of Western Massachusetts.
As far as the impact for the Festival of the Hills, I’d say the impact of the event websites were negligible.
Craigslist – For the past 2 years, I’ve posted event info in the events section of Craigslist. Of all the online marketing we’ve done, we’ve gotten the most response from our Craigslist postings. People routinely email us as a result of the Craigslist postings asking specific questions about the Festival.
Calendar listings – I worked to make sure the Festival was listed on all the local media – newspaper, radio, TV – online events calendars. Again, does anyone read those? I don’t know, but I’ll continue posting on them next year.
Email – With the website launch, we included an email sign-up form. Thus far, the sign-ups have been minimal. This year, I’m going to work on actively collecting emails from Festival attendees. My plan is that email list would be extremely dormant. Maybe, we’d email once during the summer reminding people of the date of the Festival of the Hills and asking them to save the date. Then, maybe 4 weeks prior to the event, we’d send one email per week as a reminder/build up/count down to the Festival.
Facebook – Last year, I didn’t create a Facebook fan page for the Festival. But, it’s at the top of my To Do list for this year.
As I worked on these various digital marketing initiatives for the Festival, I remember looking around online for any insight into local event SEO. I did find this blog post about local event SEO from Katz Web Services which I found helpful.
What do you think? Did I miss something obvious? Where do you think I should spend my time online this year in marketing the Festival? Right now, I’m thinking that I’m going to spend a good chunk of time on the Facebook fan page. With the viral – easy sharing – via Facebook, it seems like a no-brainer to me.
Seth Godin and book PR – should he have staggered his Linchpin PR splash?
Posted on February 16th, 2010Seth Godin’s latest book Linchpin was published on January 26th. Now, Seth Godin sure doesn’t need me to tell him how to publicize his books. He’s done a pretty damn good job already.
However, when Linchpin launched, I did notice something and wanted to mention it, because once I noticed it, I started asking myself questions.
When the book launched, for several days, everywhere I turned in social media, I saw a review or someone mentioning the book.
Here’s only a few reviews/mentions of Linchpin:
Marketing Over Coffee podcast interview with Seth – January 25th
David Meerman Scott interview with Seth Godin re: Linchpin – January 25th
Duct tape Marketing podcast interview with Seth Godin – January 26th
Gretchen Rubin’s Happiness Project blog interview with Seth Godin – January 26th
During that 4-5 day window in late January, I couldn’t open up Google Reader without seeing Seth Godin’s smiling face – and yet another interview with him about Linchpin.
But, after that overwhelming barrage of interviews, Godin and Linchpin fell off the proverbial cliff in terms of digital publicity. Most writers lie awake at night dreaming of that many interviews touting their words and wisdom. But, was is it too much all at one time?
Again, to state the obvious, Seth is a very smart marketer, and he knows what he’s doing. He doesn’t need me to tell him how to sell books.
Right now, as I write this blog post on February 16, 2010, here’s Linchpin’s current Amazon rankings:
#50 in Books
#1 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Guides
#2 in Books > Business & Investing > Business Life
#4 in Books > Reference
But, I still do wonder – what if he had staggered those interviews? Sure, you could do a big initial splash, but save your ammunition so to speak and do 3-5 interviews with influential bloggers every week for 6-8 weeks straight.
Would that staggered book publicity have an impact? What do you think?
Now, I’m off to read Linchpin and see what everyone is raving about.
Ebooks Pricing Palooza
Posted on February 15th, 2010Though I spend my working hours doing public relations/media relations for technology and digital marketing companies, I’ve had a long-time interest in book publishing. I worked in book publishing in the mid-1990s when I worked at the Denise Marcil Literary Agency. And, I’ve watched the rise in eBooks, and I’ve spent a lot of time on this blog opining about ebooks and their impact on book publishing.
Recently, Ian Lewis, read some of my blog posts about eBooks and emailed me a few questions. After several back-and-forth emails, I thought it’d be of interest to publish this email conversation as a blog post.
On Feb 12, 2010, at 5:41 PM, Ian Lewis wrote:
Jeff,
i’ve been reading a couple of your articles recently, including this one below. All very informative.
http://jeffrutherford.com/ebook-pricing-may-force-an-ebook-napster-soon
“Amazon is taking a loss on just about every hardcover title they sell on the Kindle for $9.99.”
so you are saying the publishers are forcing Amazon to charge too much for e-books, and therefore they aren’t selling as well? why is Amazon losing money?
if i was to write a book, and publish through Amazon via an e-book, and bypass the publisher, is that the ‘new model’ for new authors? or is it unlikely to sell due to zero marketing?
best wishes,
ian
Hi Ian,
Actually, I think I should clarify that post. Until the last two weeks, when Amazon got into a heated debate with Macmillan, and eventually gave into MacMillan’s pricing demands, here’s what was happening.
Amazon was buying eBooks from publishers at a wholesale price similar to a physical book. So Amazon was actually paying $13-16 per ebook, and yes, Amazon was losing money on every single eBook that they sold for $9.99. They could afford to do this, because Amazon has a lot of money in the bank. And, they were doing that, because they wanted to create a market for eBooks, and I think came up with a reasonable price point of $9.99.
However, book publishers HATED that $9.99 price because they thought it devalued the price of a book. As a result, publishers started threatening to not release ebook versions of new hardbacks until 4-6 months after the hardback was released – to keep Amazon from selling brand new books for $9.99.
But, now Amazon is in intense negotiations with a bunch of different publishers who want to raise that $9.99 price, and Amazon has basically had to give in to them.
Frankly, I think publishers are making a big mistake. Publishers are trying to say that consumers should pay the same for a digital file as a printed book. I don’t think most consumers think that way. Why should I pay $14-20 for a digital file that cost pennies to distribute.
Here’s a long comment that I recently wrote in response to a story about this whole issue on the All Things Digital blog.
Book publishers are focused on setting an artificial price. A price that has no relation to the actual cost of distributing a digital file, but has everything to do with setting a price somewhat close to a typical trade paperback. Hmm, why should I pay the same price for downloading a relatively small digital file vs. the price covering your cost of printing, binding, shipping a book to a retailer or distributor, then, oh yeah, paying the cost of those retailers to return unsold copies.
Publishers may have won the initial e-book skirmish with Amazon, but they’re going to lose that pricing argument in the long haul. Digital distribution of books will simply not command the same prices as physical copies of books. And I haven’t seen a publisher who can successfully market that message — pay us a premium for a digital file that costs us pennies to distribute.
As you pointed out with relation to the music business, raise prices and sales volumes decrease. I’ll be curious to watch a true book publisher 2.0 build a successful business model based on – low overhead for the publisher’s fixed costs, attractive low pricing to encourage impulse purchases, free e-book giveaways to build audiences for new writers (permanently free titles – not some two-week promo), etc.
Unfortunately, the majority of NYC publishers will be headed down the same road as music companies – trying to maintain high pricing for digital files with distribution costs measured in pennies, suing your most passionate fans, grasping at assorted straws vs. pursing a low-price, high volume business model.
I wrote about this in a recent blog post. I think book publishers are inviting an eBook Napster –
http://jeffrutherford.com/ebook-pricing-may-force-an-ebook-napster-soon
Finally, to answer your question about a new model for writers. Yes, I definitely think that e-publishing will be an option for writers – both writers who have had books published by traditional publishers, and writers who have never had a book published. In fact, Stephen Covey, the author of 7 Habits Of Highly Successful People recently signed a deal with Amazon to publish many of his popular books for the Kindle – and new ebooks too. In that case, Covey will get 70% of whatever Amazon charges, and Amazon will get 30%. That’s a much higher royalty rate than he’d get from a traditional publisher.
But, for the unpublished writer who decides to go down that route, you asked a very good question. What about PR and publicity. There are literally hundreds of novels being uploaded to the Kindle story every day – by previously unpublished writers. How can you stand out in that? I don’t have a good answer to that. You would have to have some kind of PR-buzz, or your book will just get lost in the ebook forest.
And, I keep using the word Kindle. There’s a company called Smashwords that will take your book and publish it electronically on multiple ebook platforms – Barnes & Noble, Sony, etc. So, it’s not just Kindle.
Also, re: the whole issue of writers who have had books published, and then making money off of ebooks sales of their old titles, you should definitely check out this blog. It’s written by JA Konrath, a crime writer who has had multiple novels published. But, he had a bunch of manuscripts of books that he had tried to sell with no success – before he sold his first novel. Now, he’s published all those old manuscripts via the Kindle Store, and he’s making money.
http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2009/10/kindle-numbers-traditional-publishing.html
