This was actually a good thing. Martin wanted to test Instagram as a pitch tool and I happened to be online. Haven’t used it since, but it was fun to experiment.
Author: Mike
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On “getting press” and metrics
Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.
So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.
By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.
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On “getting press” and metrics
Getting “press,” as this job ad I saw on HackerNews claims to want, is more than measurement. It’s about relationships, news, an eye for tying a company’s story into wider trends, and having an experienced gut feel for when a story is worthy of press and when it’s better suited for some other type of marketing channel. It’s a long game made up of moves that often go unseen because they aren’t on a plan or directly and tactically measurable.
So, please startups, if you are hiring for PR or searching for an agency to help with your marketing efforts, dig deep to understand what exactly you want them to do..and why. Not doing so wastes your time, wastes theirs and, worse, wastes the media’s.
By all means, measure what you can. But recognize the value of the unseen that makes the measurable possible.
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Running Scared: Bud, Craft and The Bowl
When you’re the biggest dog in an industry being eaten away by a band of small rebels, do you:
(a) Listen to the market and adapt your product?
(b) Rally your vast resources to build a better product?
(c) Publicly acknowledge that you are worried while simultaneously offending any potential new customer?
If you’re Anhauser-Busch, your answer is (c). Last night, the brewing behemoth used the nation’s biggest advertising platform — the Super Bowl — to run an ad not extolling the virtues of its product, but, rather, slamming the buyers of its top competition. No statistic could reinforce more clearly how the craft beer movement has hurt the commodity beer business.
When you’re the category leader, you don’t acknowledge your competitor. Ever. Unless they are really threatening your business. That’s something Budweiser tacitly admitted to the world last night.
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Twitter Video: The real current TV
Combing through my news feed this morning, I stumbled across this short video by NPH:
Check out my Twitter video #Oscar exclusive! I gots me a scoop! pic.twitter.com/SGQ3oJHDqZ
— Neil Patrick Harris (@ActuallyNPH) January 27, 2015
//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js
No big deal, right? Just Barney with a cameraphone giving everyone a quick scoop of his upcoming Academy Award hosting gig. Except it is a big deal. Because it’s the first official video shared on Twitter.
Let that sink in for a moment.
Instead of 140 tight characters, you can now squeeze more words and images into 30 second video clips. The normal soundbite is a measly 7 seconds max. Ever talk out your 140 character tweets? Less than 7 seconds even in if you talk at the speed of Stephen Wright. 30 seconds is an eternity in today’s media culture.
This is big.
Sure, we’re going to be inundated with feeds full of half-minute cat videos. Yes, the spammers are going to abuse it. And the porn. Don’t forget the porn.
But this will also give citizen journalists — people like you and me — the ability to share eyewitness accounts of global news events faster than ever. This is something Twitter has already proven itself indispensable, even in 140 character word form. What was once a river of words becomes a current of moving images. With apologies to Al Gore, Twitter has just become the real current TV.
It’s a sign that Generation YouTube has won. A generation that doesn’t tune into the morning, 5 o’clock or 10 o’clock news (11 o’clock news has long since hit the graveyard thanks to The Daily Show). It’s a generation that wants news when it happens, unfiltered by advertisers and editors.
If you’re in the news business, your world just went from soundbites to video clips. If you’re in the business of making news, it just got a lot more interesting.
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Talking tech with Tom
Redmonk analyst and Monktoberfest partner in crime Tom Raftery recently invited me to be a guest on his weekly “Technology for Good” show. You can catch us talking about wide range of tech issues in the video below.
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The Other Bird Twitter Needs
I still owe Marshall a post on how I use LittleBird, but an article popped in my newsfeed this morning that seems a bit more urgent.
Twitter was all over the tech news yesterday with people reporting and analyzing yet another management shakeup. I’ve been in big companies. News? Eh, not so much. Yet, under the cover of the coverage (see what I did there?) was legitimate conjecture on why the company’s leadership has not been able to hit the user growth targets it has set. One of the reasons, as Owen Williams points out is that the onboarding process for new users is, well, not so good a lot.
It feels like a missed opportunity to showcase other users that are active and having conversations with their followers, rather than famous people. The value in Twitter is not observing and it’s clear that this feature misses the point.
Bingo. While I follow a few celebrities, the real value of Twitter is engaging with people who know more than me on topics I care about. Which is something Twitter can’t recommend in its current onboarding process. It just doesn’t have that data or ability to know its new users beyond their address books. It’s a missed opportunity because there is a way to make the onboarding process better and much more relevant.
Imagine if, upon signing up for Twitter, you were asked “What are some topics you’re interested in?” And then, rather than spit back a suggested list of popular people to follow, it instead pre-populated a topical list of the most influential people on that topic? Helpful and relevant, no? That’s what LittleBird does. As Marshall says, it “focuses on relevant connections inside a community, not just the content people post and popularity they can fake.” I use it frequently (maybe too frequently) to discover who I should be listening to.
If I were running the onboarding process for Twitter (or whoever is running it after this last shakeup), I’d look at finding a way to integrate LittleBird. While it wouldn’t fix all the onboarding problems (number of steps, etc.), it would make Twitter instantly more relevant to every new user.
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The Billion Dollar Barometer
How much IT spending is happening in the cloud? A lot. And a big slice of it is being managed by Cloudability (client). How big of a slice? $1 billion (cue Dr. Evil laugh). ReadWrite’s Matt Asay breaks the story and finds parallels between the cloud and how open source software exploded across the enterprise.
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The Do’s and Don’ts of Evangelism
A good friend of mine who runs enterprise marketing for a top tech company recently asked me for advice to help counsel one of his executives on the differences between marketing and evangelism. The list below includes some of the top-of-mind tips I provided based on my experience:
DO
- Be human. Nobody wants to engage with a marketing droid. Be yourself. Don’t worry if a few warts show.
- Educate and inform. Be a good source for people who may eventually buy or recommend your product to turn to.
- Have a point of view. Make people pay attention and engage with you.
- Know your stuff. Your community will smell fluff from a mile away.
- Pick up the tab if you can. You’ll be surprised how far $200 at the bar or picking up pizzas for a hackathon or meetup goes.
DON’T
- Sell. Selling is the job of your sales team. Your job is to be an engaging human.
- Overly worry about being loyal to your brand. Great evangelists help their community first, even if it means saying a nice thing or two about your competition.
- Engage only when you need something. Influence is a two-way street.
- Attend conferences only if you’re invited to speak. It’s not only conceited, but you’ll also miss out on great content and relationship building.
- Expect anything of your community. Earn it.
This is by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive list. What do’s and don’ts would you include? Add them to the comments.
(For more, check out my Influencing the Influencers deck on Slideshare.)
Mike Maney 