Social Media Strategy and Blogging Consulting

Created by my friend Dan Greenfield, PR guy and excellent writer at BernaiseSource.com, PR Camp New York will be Friday, November 20th.

Join me, Social Media Club New York and a select number of PR, marketing and communications professionals for PR Camp™ New York. PR Camp New York is a full day of highly interactive discussions on social media — complete with marshmallows and a virtual campfire. It will explore how to market, measure and manage the opportunities and challenges that social media presents.

PR Camp is running in an unconference format – so no powerpoints, no panels, and no canned demos. Just hard core learning from Brand, Agency and Social Media execs from top companies in their fields.

Social Media Club New York members (and any of my friends reading this post) get a ten percent discount with promo code *SMCPRCAMPNYC.* The Early bird ends 10/30, so you’d better hurry to save some money. I hope to see you at PR Camp

I’ve been teaching and speaking a lot, and the subject of Tips for New bloggers comes up all the time.

Here is what I share with many of my classes.

Blogging is meant to be personal. A blog with a ‘corporate’ or ‘PR-speak’ tone does not become popular or well read. People associate blogs with authenticity and conversational tone.

Your blog is a conversation. You say something, and people have the ability to say something back, either in the comments, or by referencing your post on their blog and responding. By allowing this back-and-forth you learn new things, and keep your audience engaged.

Blogs are great places to conduct interviews. Is there someone you want to meet and talk to, but never knew how before? Call and ask for an interview. Everyone likes to talk about him or herself!

Add pictures, they’re worth a thousand words. But make sure you’re using your own pictures, or pictures you have a right to use. Don’t take the copyrighted works of others. Review Creative Commons http://creativecommons.org/ licensing, where you can use people’s work if they allow it, as long as you attribute it to them. Photo sharing sites such as Flickr.com allow people to tag their photos for sharing.

Finally, don’t blog angry. If you’re upset or believe that you’ve been misrepresented, write your copy and show it to someone, or wait one hour and re-read it before you post it. You’re a publisher with a world-wide audience. You may not only damage your own reputation and the reputation of anyone you write about you may also commit libel (and search engines are able to keep original versions of remarks around.) The legal definition of libel is “a written statement unjustly damaging someone’s reputation.” (source: http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/libel ) Can you be sued for blogging? Sure. This is America – they can sue you for anything!

Seriously worth looking at is the Legal Guide for Bloggers. I am not a lawyer but the guide has useful ideas.

• Be careful when republishing ANY information from another site or source, (copyrighted or not) and always provide a citation to where you found the information.
• Watch for guidelines about the usage of logos, trademarks, and other protected and valuable items of intellectual property.
• Learn the differences between being a publisher and being an editor.

And of course, if you have questions, ask an attorney!

How do you start a blog? Check this article I wrote about 8 Options to quickly build a web presence.

Google Wave: You need to pay attention to this. – Jason Kolb re: the Future of the Internet

Update: The key points from this slightly technical article are:

So, if you’re paying attention to what’s coming next – Wave is going to be a huge disruption. I can’t wait to get access and dive into this.

Posted using ShareThis

I appreciated Laurel Kaufman’s post this morning on the Girls In Tech blogs about “Big Brother Is Watching You on Facebook” and Employment Law. I think she does a good job in explaining how employees should consider privacy settings on their personal social profiles to avoid those profiles being used against them in employment settings. Of course, not putting up compromising photos or tweeting racist or obscene things will help too. But the other point is about employers restricting access to social networks at work.

I remember in the early 90s, I had to have an “Internet Permission Form” signed before I could use the net at JPMorgan. They knew which workstation was mine, and could monitor traffic. I’m sure there is less of this kind of thing at work these days (though I understand it for environments where compliance rules are in effect.)

Its my feeling that, as we move from the “Information Age” to the Network Age, employers who don’t allow employees to check their external social media sites (except in secure facilities such as military, hospital or banking) are going to have problems with both morale and productivity. Banning soc nets is much less wise than allowing the occasional peak – with recognition that employees who abuse the privilege are going to get a talking t0.

What will happen when employers block Facebook, MySpace, and other networks? Blackberry and iPhone will happen. Employees will show up with their own mobile devices, and take *longer* to access their social networks. The devices take longer to type on, longer to access the social networks, and the phone networks are slower. So instead of taking 5 minutes to read status messages, they’ll take 10. Perhaps they’ll sneak away to do this – so they won’t be at their desks to answer the phone. This is bad for your company.

Employees, like the Internet, will “route around” the obstruction.

It is more advisable to put up policies defining what is acceptable, just like the occasional personal call where we look the other way. Even better – don’t be embarrassed if your employees have personal lives, and also have a link to their job. Find ways to encourage the employees to be out promoting the company on social networks. Why have 3 “corporate communications specialists” when you could have thousands of ambassadors that love your company because you treat them with respect?

Of course, this calls for good social media policies to be in place, and some employee training. Teach your employees to talk with your customers, and solve problems. Is it worth it? Well, it was worth about $1B to Zappos.

Not sure how to set this up for your company? The Harbrooke Group, or any number of other good social media consultancies, can help you.

It’s great when I find readers who really take the advice in my column to heart.

In order to sell her product, Tina has to reach business owners and merchandisers. She’s taken to doing much of her own promotion and marketing herself in different ways from online to the phone to in-person networking. Using Tina as a model, here are 5 ways (plus a bonus way) you can promote your start up business more effectively – and obtain sales in the process.

Read more on the Start-Up Toolkit

I met Michelle Batten at the 140 Characters conference, and we had some great discussions. This week, she asked me to be on her Blog Talk Radio show.

I resumed our series about brands and consumers in the digital world this week with Howard Greenstein, a fellow Social Media Club organizer and Principal at the Harbrooke Group…. In addition to being a participant, Howard was also one of the featured Characters and gave an excellent presentation on the “Wisdom of Twitter”…The first part of our discussion explored the culture of Twitter and it’s uniqueness from other social media computing platforms.

iMediaWorksConnect: Michelle Batten, Lead Marketing Strategist’s stories on digital marketing and integrated interactive communications: Episode 6: Twitter: One Big Social Block Party

Michelle asked me about what makes companies successful on Twitter, and also about the differences between Twitter and Facebook as platforms for end users as well as marketers. You can read the summary above at Michelle’s site or listen on BTR.

From the Start-Up Toolkit

I’ve been writing about having a small business website, in 8 Options to Quickly Build a Web Presence for your Startup, about using a blog to promote your business in Building Success By Blogging: An Architect’s Story and even about Smart Blogging Strategies. Today we’re going to explore the magic of a technology called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS lets you publish content on your site, and have other people easily view it on many other sites.

While RSS is well known to many of my technical friends, it really can be a magic way to improve your marketing presence. All blogs create RSS feeds, which is why I often recommend a blog to customers.

This is a “full disclosure” post of sorts. Today’s NY Times ran a piece about bloggers being influenced by Sponsors. I have no sponsors, but I felt it important to be more clear about an experience I had recently. (I’ve also added a disclosure page here and at http://howardgreenstein.com/blog/bio/disclosure – I used the template at DisclosurePolicy.Org to do so – quite useful.)

Recently, I visited the Pepsi campuses in Valhalla and Purchase, NY. As I blogged about Pepsi Innovation Day, I was a guest of Bonin Bough, invited by Stephanie Agresta. I know Bonin via work I had done for his former employer, Weber Shandwick, in the past. Stephanie has consulted with me under the Harbrooke Group banner, and I’ve worked for her firm as well (she’s now working at PR Firm Porter Novelli, and I’ve been asked to do work for her there of a confidential nature). I respect both of them as marketing professionals who understand the value of relationships in business.

During the day the group received access to Pepsi executives, received lunch, access to more chips and soda than any human should be allowed, and a chance to, among other things, make our ‘own soda.’  Upon leaving, we were given gift bags that had chips in them from other countries, soda, a small flash drive from Gatorade, and some schwag with the Pepsi logo (a hat and scarf). Maybe $25 worth of stuff. The chips were fun – I did taste tests with my kids to see if they could identify flavors of chips from places like England, Argentina and Japan.
Bottom line, I wanted to disclose this experience from Pepsi. They’ve put up YouTube Videos of the event, and I appear in them, so it is fair to mention this on the blog.

I do believe this visit was useful because it showed me a company the size of Pepsi is interested in hearing from Social Media practitioners face to face. I don’t think they were buying us – quite the opposite – it was a costly day for me in terms of time away from clients. But it was positive in that I got a chance to meet some other blogger/influencer types and get to know them better. I also got a chance to meet Pepsi staff and hear some of their marketing challenges – a great learning experience for me.

I won’t let this experience significantly influence my work. I’m not here shouting that you should buy Pepsi instead of Coke. I strive to maintain my independence as a blogger. I don’t take anything of significant monetary value from anyone for my writing or my various blogs (including my Inc.com blog). If you happen to think I’m fronting for someone, feel free to let me know.