on Sunday I gave a lecture at The Marker’s Customer Experience Conference. I spoke about: “The relationship between the brand and the consumer on social networks: From flirt to love.”

How should brands engage with consumers on social networks? You’ll see that the relationship between brands and consumers on social networks is very similar to the relationship between couples.  The presentation displays three examples of  brands that handle their social media efforts differently. HP, the third brand, clearly exemplifies how giving back to your community, being responsive and listening before selling is the best policy. Please note that the presentation is in Hebrew.

I’ve been in the social media space now for quite a few years and I meet with at least 5 companies each week who have understood the importance of utilizing social media for their businesses but are still afraid of entering their brands into the new media age.

What are they worried about? Here are the top five concerns that I’ve heard from executives and my response to them:

1) They’re afraid they’ll lose control of their brand and open themselves up to negative feedback – When you open a business and start marketing your services and exposing your brand to others, people will start talking about your brand. And this is what you wanted right? This is why you exposed them to your brand in the first place.  People are going to be talking about your brand no matter what. The question is: Do you want to be a part of the dialogue or do you want to just play ostrich and ignore what people are saying? If a person is dissatisfied with your services, do you prefer he opens up this discussion in a “I hate <your brand>” group opened up by another hater or do you prefer that he come to your page and post the complaint there allowing you to respond appropriately and even perhaps win him back as a client?
Social media didn’t create the dissatisfied customer – it only allowed him a platform to express his frustration. If you don’t give him the stage to speak, he will do it elsewhere and believe me, it will cause a great deal more damage to your brand if you’re not there to respond and open to criticism.
When we speak of social media, we speak of conversational marketing – listening before selling, opening a dialogue with the user and not just throwing a blinking banner in his face. Brands need to make that switch in their heads and understand that social media is SOCIAL. Many conversations will be positive and you will have these nice messages recorded for everyone to see publicly – your bosses, your investors, your customers and potential customers:

Some conversations may be negative but these conversations should be seen as welcomed opportunities to gain back customers. If you utilize social media effectively and are alert to what people are saying about you online, then you can also respond in a timely and intelligent manner. When you’re dazed and confused and too afraid to see what people may be saying about you, that’s when the conversation can get out of control and your branding and positioning can go out the window. Companies who understand social media know that by using social media they are increasing the number of positive responses to their brand and making sure to control and decrease the negative responses by showing people that they actually care about what they have to say.

2) They don’t understand it – Companies fear social media because they don’t understand what to do with it, what to talk about, who to turn to. They often time try to do it in-house without the appropriate guidance, fail miserably and then say that social media doesn’t work. Don’t hire your friend’s son who is very active on Facebook to do your marketing strategy for you. Just like you wouldn’t fix your car in-house or do your PR in-house, neither should you start doing social media on your own without having a social media guru at your side. And when I say guru, I mean someone who has had a good track record in creating successful social media campaigns for other companies in the past. Once you have such a guide at your side and you begin to understand what social media is all about, then you will not be afraid of it anymore and you will start to recognize the infinite number of amazing opportunities that social media will open your brand to.

3) The effectiveness of social media is hard to measure - Since social media is still in it’s diapers, it took a little while for tools tracking the ROI on social media campaigns to emerge, however today we have a suite of different tools that allow companies to track even the most minute details in the effectiveness of their social media campaigns. Tools like Google Analytics which allow us to track the traffic coming into our site as well as where it’s coming from has existed for years. Google alerts which allow us to see the blog posts and other sites linking back to our site have also existed for a long time. And we are now seeing an influx of services that not only allow you to easily monitor what people are saying about your brand but also see who are the top influencers, opinion leaders in your industry and more. There are numerous services that allow you to see the top influencers on twitter such as: Twitter grader and twitter analytics services such as Twitalyzer . Facebook also provides its own insights to page admins and enables admins to view information regarding the demographics of their fans and also how many interactions, comments, wall posts, etc. were found on the page. The more we learn about social media, the more tools we get to measure it. Not only are our efforts in the social media realm measurable but social media campaigns also allow us to target specific campaigns to specific niches like no other media today.

4) They’re afraid that employees will be on Facebook and twitter chatting all day – Facebook today has around 350 million users. If Facebook was a nation, it would be the world’s third most populous after China and India. Your employees are there anyway. Why not utilize the fact that they are there to help your cause? When you need to spread the word on Facebook, why not enable your employees to help you or when you finally open that fan page on Facebook, why not allow your employees to become fans and encourage them to take part in your social media activities. Dell for example, who is well known for their great twitter strategy (a strategy which has earned them $6.5 million to date), has around 200 employees working its twitter account, responding to people.

In addition, not allowing your employees to have access to the vast amount of information that can be found on social networks as well as not enabling them to use these networks as research tools nor to network with people in the industry also puts your company at a great disadvantage to your competitors who do allow their employees (and even encourage them) to use social media tools.

5) Social media is costly – This last fear is not only something that companies should not fear but it is also not true. If you consider the millions of people that you can reach using social media as opposed to the cost of buying an ad on TV or buying a banner, you’ll see that social media is one of the most cost efficient ways of reaching your target audience today.

To anyone who still thinks social media is a fad, WAKE UP. It’s not. Social media is here and it’s here to stay. If you took a look at the latest report that came out of Davos regarding social networks, you’ll see that Facebook is now the second most popular site on the internet after Google and that according to Nielsen since February 2009 people have been spending more time on social-networking sites than on e-mail, and the lead is getting bigger. The question for your brand is no longer whether to be there or not to be there. The question is WHEN will you be there and the longer you keep your head in the ground, the more you’ll lose touch with what’s happening out there in the real world.

Great Ostrich pic credit: http://blog.karmona.com

Many B2B companies ask me whether Social Media is right for them. This post is all about why social media and B2B go hand in hand. Social Media is all about conversational marketing and this is why it works so well with B2B strategy.

Social media is not about the masses. It is about reaching your target audience. Listening before selling and hearing before talking. Oftentimes businesses like to measure a social media campaign’s success by the number of followers its twitter account has or the number of fans their facebook page has, however, these measures are not necessarily the signs to a well-executed social media campaign.

Social media is all about the few rather than the many. The community you build up is ideally made up of the people who are most interested in your brand. If we apply the 80-20 rule here, we are speaking of the 20% who make up 80% of your business.

B2B strategy, just like B2C strategy is all about networking, conversing with the right people,  at the right time. The more in tune you are to things that are happening in your network, the more you increase your chances to be at the right place, at the right time.

According to eMarketer in 2010, these will be the results for online marketing spending:

As you can see, Website spending is forecast to rise 71% and social media spending will increase 60% in the next year.

It is apparent that companies are understanding that they need to: 1) Create a social presence within social networks and 2) Create a Website and/or blog that reflects an active online presence.

As to the reasons most B2B companies are using social networks, emarketer had the following results:

As you can see, companies turn to social networks to show their leadership in their field, to find new potential customers by communicating with the community, to receive customer feedback and give customer service. There’s no better tool these days than twitter to handle real-time customer service issues and many brands do this beautifully, including ComcastCares, Dell, and Starbucks. They also advertise and do market research via social networks.

What about the reasons that companies use social media?

The top reason B2B companies (just like B2C companies) use social media is to generate awareness about their brand. Second top reason is to engage with customers on an on-going daily basis. As you can see, the 3rd top reason that companies use social media is to engage with top influencers on the Web.

Monitoring online conversations and responding to feedback is an extremely important element of social media which only 14% of companies seem to understand.

B2B companies that are not utilizing the social tools they are given today, will find themselves at a major disadvantage to other B2B companies that are using LinkedIn, twitter and other such networks to extend their reach and create better communication between the brand and their customers and potential customers.

Next time you doubt whether social media is right for B2B companies, think about what B2B strategy is all about – it is about the relationships and partnerships you build with your colleagues and there’s no better way to do this today than through social media.

Image credit: StickyMessage

(Guest post by Dorine Sinigaglia)

Recently, I noticed a friend of mine following a food truck company on Twitter. Call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t even know food trucks were still around – let alone had Twitter accounts! Food vendors always reminded me of a place where starved businessmen would run to grab a quick bite in TV sitcoms. I realized I knew very little about this business, so I began to do some research, as the concept of food trucks’ branding and marketing tactics on Twitter began to intrigue me. I was amazed at the amount of information I found online revolving food vendors’ online presence and I quickly grew an appetite to write a new post.

Street food vendors, trucks and carts have been around way before the time of Twitter – so it’s evident that their primary source of growth and ways of  promoting locations on an hourly basis is not solely done through Twitter (most of them have developed websites with full menus and directions to daily location stops). On the other hand, since Twitter is now available as a means of marketing and promoting brands, food vendors have quickly jumped on the Twitter bandwagon and are utilizing its real-time status updates to their advantage. According to Ann Handley from Mashable, “a growing number of street vendors have been leveraging Twitter in innovative and interesting ways, serving up lessons for any business” – in her article Tweetable Eats: What Street Vendors Can Teach Businesses About Twitter. With the help of Twitter, street food vendors can promote their precise stopped locations and what they are serving throughout the day by tweeting to the hungry public.

Many brands are on Twitter but don’t know how to engage with their followers or create constant dialogue to keep them coming back to read about company news or industry updates. When searching for street food vendors’ presence on Twitter, I found that most of them didn’t have more than 2,500 followers – and some had as few as 250 followers. Since their target markets are “geographically constrained” – says Ann, you won’t find food vendors on Twitter with tens of thousands of followers. For street food vendors, “1,000 followers who will actually do business with you are ultimately more valuable to your business that 100,000 less-engaged people.” There are exceptions of course – like Kogi Korean BBQ –  an extremely successful Korean BBQ taco truck that has a dynamic website filled with photos, videos, a blog, and also a Twitter account with almost 50,000 followers! According to an article in the LA Times – Living section featuring this successful taco truck,  Kogi brings in “300 to 800 people each time it parks (often several times in an evening).” But overall, street food vendors have to do much more than just “follow” people on Twitter in hopes of gaining a customer or two – for it doesn’t matter how big the list is if they don’t make it to the food cart.

For street food vendors, it is about finding the right followers in order to ensure a successful lunch hour. There are a few important tips that food vendors must keep in mind in order to get proper exposure in general – and most importantly, before lunch time when its their busiest time for sales.

First, they must know who their target market is. If the local taco stand or hot dog cart tends to remain in the Los Angeles region, for example, roaming from one college campus to another within the same county boundaries, their target audience is specifically people who live in Los Angeles and attending students of those colleges. If the food cart tends to post up near local museums, on the other hand, their target market is much wider and appeals to a variety of crowds. In general, it is crucial to know who their target market is and where these customers roam in order to ensure a high attendance to their parked food cart.

Next, street food vendors must create a tasty demand for their products while simultaneously creating a sense of urgency in their tweets. Some vendors post a brief menu of their available foods or how many items they have left before they run out for the day to create that sense of urgency in the customer’s potential purchase and gets their mouth watering for the vendor’s food (if they can throw in a quick link to a picture of their melting grilled cheese sandwich or their sizzling hamburger, this helps wonders!). According to Ann, food vendors must “communicate the breadth and depth of your products or services on Twitter in a fresh, compelling way, and in a manner that speaks directly to your customer’s needs.”

Food vendors must humanize their brand in order to reach out to their customer’s hungry heart. Monitoring conversations online is key in this business and goes a long way in terms of keeping customers feeling appreciated and humanizing the brand. Responding to customer’s comments and questions in real-time is crucial to keep the business going successfully and they should listen to customer’s suggestions and feedback with the use of Twitter and use this vital information as a resource for product development and ways to improve their business. According to Ann, food vendors must “reveal a little bit about the people and personalities who run your business so that your customers can connect with you on a human level.”

And now, its all about continuous open communication. Twitter’s real-time social platform allows food vendors to be in regular, instant communication with its customers and keep them informed on news and updates – even if the news is not in their favor (for customers respect honesty and would rather know the truth than come hungry and be let down). Whether food vendors publicize their locations and hours on Twitter or send a tweet about how they didn’t find parking on the street, communication is key to keep the customer engaged and coming back for more tasty treats.

Done correctly and with style, Twitter goes a long way in having the ability to connect customers with their business in an immediate, intimate level. But since Twitter is only one social media tool for food vendors to utilize for promoting their brand, like any marketing efforts, spreading the word about their tasty foods is done best when integrated with other valuable tools – like having a company blog, a dynamic website and by reaching out to the blogosphere for other companies to write about their products. Now, Twitter is simply another great resource for food vendors to be able to reach out to their community in a quick fashion with real-time updates and tasty tweets that bring hungry customers to their cart simply because they feel they have to save the last, lonely hot dog from the stand before closing time.

Is it lunch time yet?

Dorine Sinigaglia is the Account & Content Manager at Blonde 2.0

In the years that I’ve been involved in social media, I have heard so many misconceptions and myths about social media that I am certain this article is long overdue. Here is a list of the top five misconceptions regarding social media:

1) Misconception #1: Social Media is only right for certain brands – Often time people ask me: ” Is social media only right for web services or for “cool” products? The answer is no. Social media is right for every brand as long as the brand is able to find its target audience within a certain platform and converse/interact with it in an effective manner. Of course it may be exciting to do a marketing campaign for Apple than for Charles Schwab but for either one of those brands a targeted social media campaign within social networks and the blogosphere can bring amazing results as far as: Brand awareness, Overall buzz around the brand, traffic, customer loyalty and ultimately revenue.
In fact often time it is the “duller” brands that experience the most growth out of social media campaigns because they experience a more substantial change in popularity between their starting point A and their ending point B than the “cooler” brands. Take for example Mint which is an online personal finance service and was just bought by Intuit for $170 Million. Not the most exciting of startups perhaps and yet Mint is a fine example of a company that did a great job in using social media to maximize the buzz around its brand, making its blog magazine-like with articles about tips for young parents and other interesting content. Mint made their content so interesting in fact that users/blog readers promote the brand on their own.

2) Misconception #2: Social Media is all about getting traffic and quickly – Social media marketing is a long term process that takes time. Once a brand enters any network such as Facebook or MySpace, it takes time to build that brand’s community. Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is a community on Facebook. If you want to do social media marketing right and not just spam the hell out of people, you must use conversational marketing to engage them. Conversational marketing is all about conversing with your community. Learning more about their likes and dislikes, listening before speaking and reacting based upon the customers’ feedback.
Whoever thinks that he will open a Facebook page and reach tens of thousands of site visitors on the first day, is dead wrong. Brands that use social media to promote themselves will see a steady growth in traffic to their sites over time as their brand names become more and more viral within the networks – due to the increase in number of fans, number of tweets, exposure in blogs, etc.
Sure there are different ways which will increase the rate of a brand’s virality on the Web. For example, creating strong social incentives for people on your site which will increase their urge to promote your brand is definitely a factor which will heighten the public’s awareness. You can read more about social incentives in this post I had written last year. However, don’t expect to get thousands of visitors to your site before you’ve been able to build 1) A strong loyal online community 2) A strong incentives system to increase brand awareness. Both these goals take time to achieve. From my experience, it usually takes about three months to start seeing effective results when using social media tools.

3) Misconception #3: “By using social media we will lose control of our Brand’s Image” – Executives (especially in big companies) often think that their employees will go wild and start telling every horror story imaginable regarding their brand because the company will open a Facebook page. So here’s the scoop: People will talk about your brand whether you like it or not. Opening a Facebook page is not going to change it and not opening a Facebook page is not going to make it go away. The question is: Do you want to be a part of that conversation or not? By having a presence in social networks and blogs, you as a brand show your customers and employees that you care about their feedback and that you are there to listen and satisfy their needs.
I’ll give you a real time example: My hosting company is Network Solutions. For a few days my blog wasn’t uploading and I started to get very pissed off. I tweeted “Network Solutions Sucks” and specifically addressed @Shashib – the guy who handles Network Solutions’ social media efforts. A few moments later I received a tweet back from Shashib. He wanted to hear what’s wrong and help me resolve the problem. He promised a Network Solutions agent would call me soon. Within a few moments I received a phone call from an agent who helped me fix the situation and upload my site. At that moment, Network Solutions won my customer loyalty forever (or until the next time they screw up ). Real time customer care is something that brands can utilize social media tools for (specifically twitter) like no other marketing tools they have had till now. We’ve already seen amazing examples of customer care from Zappos and Dell. Brands should not be afraid of engaging in honest and transparent conversations with their clients online but rather they should be very afraid of ignoring their customers’ complaints and pretending that everything’s fine when it’s not.

4) Misconception #4: Social Media Is Just a Fad – I often hear people who say that social networks are just a passing fad. This is what I have to say to them: Social media is an inevitable digital evolution of our desire as humans to communicate with one another. It is a desire that we always had and will always continue to have as long as we are human. I had written about this topic in the past. To say that social media is just a fad is to say that communication is just a fad. Here are a few stats that might help to change the mind of those who are still apprehensive:

1) 2/3 of the global internet population visit social networks and time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall internet rate, accounting for ~10% of all internet time.

2) Visiting social sites is now the 4th most popular online activity – ahead of personal email!

Care to change your mind?

5) Misconception #5: “I don’t need a professional to do social media for me” – Many executives think that they don’t need a professional to help them with their social media activities. They’ll just take a student who has a few hours a week and get him to sit on the social networks and play with their company’s branding. It’s inconceivable to me how on one hand companies can be so cautious regarding beginning to use social media and on the other hand they’ll give the work to a mere student who could ruin their branding in a few hours just to save a few bucks. In order to engage in social media campaigns that are effective and successful, companies should use social media expert services at least in the first few months just to understand the specific rules of each community. One must remember that Facebook, twitter, Mixx, Bebo are all communities with their own set of rules and it is crucial for brands to respect the community’s rules in order to survive. Just like a company wouldn’t take on its PR on its own without consulting with a PR expert first, a company should not delve into social media without consulting with a social media expert. After a few months of training, I believe brands can take the work upon themselves, but they must not forgo the training period as they could do more damage than good for their branding.

These are the top five misconceptions I’ve heard regarding social media although I’ve heard many more. I would be delighted if you guys shared in the comments section some of the misconceptions that you’ve heard.

Photo credit: Gary Hayes and Laurel Papworth

I just came back from Internet Week NYC and I will be posting various interesting videos I took there in the next couple of days. While there, I had the pleasure of meeting the fabulous Jolie O’Dell from Read Write Web. We discussed the value of using social media marketing for brands and the extraordinary viral effects of a simple tweet or Facebook post. We talked about the ease of measuring social media campaigns plus the sheer cost efficiency of using available, online tools, in order to market a product. I also point out that many companies don’t have a true understanding of the niche and up to date channels and tools that are so imperative in making an online campaign a true success because they do not live online and use the tools themselves. Check out the video below:

Apropo, did you see that Blonde 2.0 was also mentioned on CNN Money this week?

ReadWriteWeb recently published the results of a one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US done by The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth.  According to results: “familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.”

Here are some more interesting stats for you taken from Robin Good’s blog:

1) 39% of these 500 companies are blogging currently – a 20% increase since 2007.

2) The social media that was most familiar to companies both in 2007 and 2008 was social networks. However 57% claim to be “very familiar with it” this year as opposed to 42% in 2007.

3) Familiarity with wikis jumped ahead of podcasting this year.

4) Even though podcasting was found to be the least familiar media this year, it still has a 21% adoption rate.

5) Adoption of all six forms of social media is rapidly growing. An astounding 77% of these companies report usage of at least some social media tool.

6) 44% of respondents in this year’s study feel that social media is “very important” to their business and marketing strategy as opposed to only 26% in 2007. We can see that companies are truly beginning to understand the importance of social media to their business strategy and goals.

Given these figures, it is obvious that social media is no longer only familiar to and used by early adaptors.  America’s fastest growing companies are turning to social media because they understand that by using these tools they will they be able to achieve success in today’s online world.

In related studies, Universal McCann found that half of adults in the US now use some form of social media online and the April prediction from Forrester Research is that “Enterprise 2.0″ will become a $4.6 billion industry over the next 5 years.

So my question to you is: Are you incorporating these tools yet in your business strategy?

Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group, had recently written a guest post on TechCrunch regarding the strategies his company uses to promote his clients’ videos online. He writes:

“Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine.”

Dan argues that content is not king and you can get at least 100,000 views even if your video doesn’t have killer content, given that you use the following techniques:

• Make it short: 15-30 seconds is ideal; break down long stories into bite-sized clips
• Design for remixing: create a video that is simple enough to be remixed over and over again by others. Ex: Dramatic Hamster
• Don’t make an outright ad: if a video feels like an ad, viewers won’t share it unless it’s really amazing. Ex: Sony Bravia
• Make it shocking: give a viewer no choice but to investigate further. Ex: UFO Haiti
• Use fake headlines: make the viewer say, “Holy shit, did that actually happen?!” Ex: Stolen Nascar
• Appeal to sex: if all else fails, hire the most attractive women available to be in the video. Ex: Yoga 4 Dudes

Then Dan continues to go into the specific marketing strategies that his company uses in order to make these videos attract at least 100,000 views.

He writes:

“The core concept of video marketing on YouTube is to harness the power of the site’s traffic. Here’s the idea: something like 80 million videos are watched each day on YouTube, and a significant number of those views come from people clicking the “Videos” tab at the top. The goal is to get a video on that Videos page, which lists the Daily Most Viewed videos.“

How do they do that?

• Blogs: They approach bloggers who write about relevant topics and actually pay them to post their embedded videos.
• Forums: They start new threads and embed their videos. Sometimes, they even kickstart conversations by setting up multiple accounts on each forum and posting back and forth between a few different (fake) users.
• MySpace: They embed the videos in the comments section of MySpace users’ pages. 
• Facebook: They build a large friends base on Facebook and then share the video with their entire friends list. Other times they create an event that announces the video launch and invite friends to watch it by writing a note and tagging them. They also post the video on Facebook Video with a link back to the original YouTube video.
• Email lists: They send the video to an email list of users.
• Friends: They make sure everyone they know watches the video and try to get them to email it out to their friends, or at least share it on Facebook.

Dan adds: “Each video has a shelf life of 48 hours before it’s moved from the Daily Most Viewed list to the Weekly Most Viewed list, so it’s important that this happens quickly.”

Here are some more techniques Dan’s company uses:

1) Title Optimization – they use catchy and misleading titles for the first few days, then later switch to something more relevant to the brand. Examples of phrases used: “exclusive,” “behind the scenes,” and “leaked video.”

2) Thumbnail Optimization - attractive video thumbnails, Dan says, are what will get users to click on your video as opposed to the rest of the videos on the Most Viewed page. Edit the video and make sure that the middle frame is interesting. The middle frame is important because YouTube provides three choices for a video’s thumbnail, one of which is grabbed from the exact middle of the video. The thumbnail should also be clear and should preferably have a face or person in it.

3) Commenting – different people in Dan’s office log in to their YouTube accounts and post heated comments back and forth in the comments section under the video so as to create a controversy and get attention. They also delete negative comments about the video or brand. Dan writes: “We can’t let one user’s negativity taint everyone else’s opinions.”

4) Releasing Videos Simultaneously – if they have multiple videos, they post them all at the same time. The logic behind this is that if someone watches the first video and is intrigued then he would want to watch more later, so why make him wait?

Once the first video is done, they delete their second video and then re-upload it. This gives them another 48-hours to push it to the Most Viewed page. They repeat this with all the next videos.

5) Strategic Tagging - Dan’s company discovered that instead of using tags to optimize the video for searches on YouTube, one can use tags to control the videos that show up in the Related Videos box. They choose three or four unique tags (tags that are not used by any other YouTube videos) and use only these tags for all of the videos they post. This allows them to have full control over the videos that show up as “Related Videos.”

When views decrease, they start adding some more generic tags that will help people find the video when searching on YouTube and Google.

In conclusion Dan writes:

“The Wild West days of Lonely Girl and Ask A Ninja are over. You simply can’t expect to post great videos on YouTube and have them go viral on their own, even if you think you have the best videos ever. These days, achieving true virality takes serious creativity, some luck, and a lot of hard work. So, my advice: fire your PR firm and do it yourself.”

Well, it wasn’t surprising to see that Dan got a serious beating in the comments section of this post. Michael Arrington himself commented: “I will post a longer response to this later, but frankly I’m disgusted by this.” And later…”I think it would have been better to have published this anonymously, and certainly without the links to Dan’s business.”

Another reader commented:

“Misleading titles, creating fake user accounts and talking to themselves, deleting comments they don’t like, paying bloggers to post videos … what a great company that would be to work for, I can’t imagine why anyone (knowingly) would use them, with all of the “fake” views the videos get because of them.”

Dan comments back:

“What we do is grease the viral wheels. If that means commenting back and forth between fake users, who cares? It’s all about entertainment – we’re just making the whole experience entertaining, not just the video itself.”

To which another person replies:

“Of course, Dan. Who would care about a little fraud in pursuit of a buck? I mean, as long as it moves the goods, there’s nothing wrong with fooling the populace.

Idiot. The reason your trickery is necessary that your venal predecessors in advertising have burned their credibility in other media already. And now here you are, a leech on a new medium, feeding off the trust that other people have built up. Pathetic.

I can’t help but note you don’t provide a single verifiable fact about your business above. The simple assumption is that you lie to your clients just as glibly as you lie to the general public. If fake videos and fake comments, why not fake views, fake click-throughs, and fake campaign success? I’m sure it pays just as well.”

For me, it was quite interesting to read this post, entertaining to read the comments, and hilarious to read Dan’s follow up post of apology and defensiveness. Especially since all of this seemed quite coincidentally to cause quite a controversy.

In any case, here are my thoughts on this post:

Some of these tactics such as creating an attractive thumbnail and title optimization make sense. However, why mislead people? Why not give the video a relevant and catchy title so that if someone is looking for a video of this kind or from this brand, he will find it?

Using a company like Dan’s to spam random people to death on various social networks with videos they don’t want to watch, about topics they’re not interested in, with misleading titles, and fake commenting, can only damage your brand, not help it. If I as a user, receive an irritating spam video from a certain company, I would only think negatively of it. These sorts of strategies abuse the democracy of Web 2.0 where people come to view and rank content that is relevant to them. These schemes create false impressions of high ratings and manipulate the democratic ranking system on which Web 2.0 is based. 

In my opinion, Content IS king. Relevant content is even more king.  - if you produce an entertaining, creative, clever video and share it with people who actually find an interest in the relevant topic or brand, then you win. Why push people to watch content that doesn’t interest them? What is the point of delivering your content to an audience that will only get irritated? 

I’ve said it over and over again, when you market your brand on social networks, you must make sure that you’re delivering the right content to the right people. Find the people who might be interested in your product within your social network. Converse with them. Find out what their needs are. Make sure that the content interests them. Don’t just spam people. Social networks are all about your honest interaction with others. Don’t create fake profiles. Don’t create fake commenting. Be yourself. You should get to know your community and become a truthful and active participant in it. Marketing on social platforms if done in an open, honest, and intelligent manner can be very effective indeed. However companies like The Comotion Group only hurt the reputation of other marketers who try to sincerely interest users in products that match their needs and do not try to mislead them into clicking on content based on false declarations.

Thanks to Steve Rubel for the picture.

Allen Stern wrote a very interesting post recently about how people such as Robert Scoble use Facebook and Twitter as more of a publicity network than a social network to brand themselves and expose their videos, posts. Currently Scoble has 6,892 followers on Twitter and 4,892 friends on Facebook. He has been complaining about the fact that Facebook limits him to only 5,000 friends.

When looking at Mashable‘s account on Twitter, we also see Pete Cashmore twittering only new posts on Mashable and nothing else. As Allen points out:

“A social networking tool becomes a publicity tool when “I speak, you speak, I reply, you reply” becomes “I speak, you listen”.

In all honesty, while at first I used Twitter for social purposes, now I find myself twittering mostly about my latest blog posts and using Facebook mainly for my social interactions with people. For me Twitter has become quite a difficult platform to interact with friends as random thoughts and links are being continously thrown on my screen. Facebook on the other hand allows me to interact with my friends in so many different and interesting ways that I hardly need an additional platform to do that. With all due respect, Twitter has merely become for me one of the many applications that I use on Facebook.

It is true that many bloggers and site owners use both platforms (and others) to expose their posts/messages to the world. As Allen writes:

“Are these new publicity networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) the new press release? Think about it for a second, a press release is sent out to x journalists, news providers, etc. These new publicity networks do the same thing except in a quicker, more efficient way. In fact, Marshall over at RWW says these publicity networks are paying his rent. Naturally I am not suggesting that everyone uses these networks in a publicity-oriented manner, but it seems many of the smart marketers are doing so. As long as the people attached to your account (personal or business) understand that’s the use, then it’s a perfect marketing opportunity. In fact, these publicity networks may just overtake RSS in the long-term. And if you are working with a social media consultant who isn’t leveraging these new publicity networks where appropriate, you need to find a new consultant.”

I agree with Allen. All these social networks are vital tools for any marketer today. However, marketers must remember that conversation is a crucial part of the marketing process today. You must offer friends relevant and interesting content in order to catch their attention. Therefore whatever way you use your networks, make sure to continuously offer them content that interests them and serves their needs as well as yours. Choosing your friends based on common interests (such as Web 2.0 for example) is one way of ensuring that you are delivering news that will probably interest them and serve their purposes as well.

Allen Stern wrote a very interesting post recently about how people such as Robert Scoble use Facebook and Twitter as more of a publicity network than a social network to brand themselves and expose their videos, posts. Currently Scoble has 6,892 followers on Twitter and 4,892 friends on Facebook. He has been complaining about the fact that Facebook limits him to only 5,000 friends.

When looking at Mashable‘s account on Twitter, we also see Pete Cashmore twittering only new posts on Mashable and nothing else. As Allen points out:

“A social networking tool becomes a publicity tool when “I speak, you speak, I reply, you reply” becomes “I speak, you listen”.

In all honesty, while at first I used Twitter for social purposes, now I find myself twittering mostly about my latest blog posts and using Facebook mainly for my social interactions with people. For me Twitter has become quite a difficult platform to interact with friends as random thoughts and links are being continously thrown on my screen. Facebook on the other hand allows me to interact with my friends in so many different and interesting ways that I hardly need an additional platform to do that. With all due respect, Twitter has merely become for me one of the many applications that I use on Facebook.

It is true that many bloggers and site owners use both platforms (and others) to expose their posts/messages to the world. As Allen writes:

“Are these new publicity networks (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) the new press release? Think about it for a second, a press release is sent out to x journalists, news providers, etc. These new publicity networks do the same thing except in a quicker, more efficient way. In fact, Marshall over at RWW says these publicity networks are paying his rent. Naturally I am not suggesting that everyone uses these networks in a publicity-oriented manner, but it seems many of the smart marketers are doing so. As long as the people attached to your account (personal or business) understand that’s the use, then it’s a perfect marketing opportunity. In fact, these publicity networks may just overtake RSS in the long-term. And if you are working with a social media consultant who isn’t leveraging these new publicity networks where appropriate, you need to find a new consultant.”

I agree with Allen. All these social networks are vital tools for any marketer today. However, marketers must remember that conversation is a crucial part of the marketing process today. You must offer friends relevant and interesting content in order to catch their attention. Therefore whatever way you use your networks, make sure to continuously offer them content that interests them and serves their needs as well as yours. Choosing your friends based on common interests (such as Web 2.0 for example) is one way of ensuring that you are delivering news that will probably interest them and serve their purposes as well.