Why is it taking me so long to write up a couple of summarising paragraphs about Social Marketers Summit 2010? Everybody has written about it already – Patrick Zandl on Lupa.cz, Maru Grafová on her own blog and countless others everywhere in the media. The reason is that I thought long and hard about writing this post, re-wrote it from the scratch twice and realised it’s worthy of being published.

There is so much to say about SMS 2010, because it was a conference full of discrepancies and controversies. However, many others have done it for me, so it would be better for me to leave it up to them.

Personally, I was a bit disappointed, because I had expected the organizers to say something new and applicable in the Czech environment. Some speakers were dead-on when it came to social media essentials, but nobody really broadened my horizons. Even though it could have been better, thank goodness for relatively high quality of this conference. Compared to seminars of APRA, it was a good standard.

For those of you, who want to read this post in Czech, feel free to point your browsers to Honza Páv’s blog Eikasia.cz.

Czech marketers still perceive social media as a threat and do not realise the potential of the dialogue. Being on social networks and gaining relevance among the customers is so easy, though. Consider this very common dialogue between and agency and a client, where the client is inquiring about his plan regarding social networks.

Client: “We want to be present in social media.”

Agency (full of excitement): “That’s great! We can start building up your image with blogs, then move to Facebook and maybe even start tweeting. Where would you like to start?”

C: “I’m not sure we would like to do any of that.”

A: “What? How do you want to start a dialogue without taking initiative?”

C: “Who said we want to start a dialogue? We just want to be there and listen.”

A: “Sure, that’s an important part of participating in that field but sooner or later, you will have to start talking so you can be recognized and claim your voice.”

C: “Yeah, about that, we don’t want to be recognized and we certainly don’t want to talk openly.”

A: “That’s confusing. Why exactly do you want to be present in social networks?”

C: “Because there are people saying bad things about us and making plans how to destroy our reputation. We have to know about it and stop them.”

A: contemplating the difference between paranoia and insanity “So, you just want to spy on people?”

The interesting part of the dialogue usually ends here and the rest of the meeting is spent on crushing of good ideas (from the agency’s perpective) and yammering about a bogus idea that consumers have power (from the client’s perspective).

Are we stupid?

There is an awful lot of Czech clients who do not see the social media as an opportunity to engage with their customers. Instead, they view it as a breeding ground for dissent and potential harm to their brand. How come the marketers have become so adversarial towards the very people they cater to? I don’t know, but feel free to express your opinion in the comments section. However, it seems to be a prevalent and an ongoing trend among the marketers.

How it really is

The truth is that people talk about your brand on social media regardless of your presence or activitiy. The landscape has shifted and become entirely different compared to the last decade. You can only be a part of the dialogue and try to be either useful or entertaining to the customers. Forget about controlling the message. All you can do is to measure response and decide whether it’s negative or positive. If you decide to use social media as a sales channel, you can also measure conversion rate, but that’s about it.

Getting rid of a communication block

Nothing persuades you of the value of communication over social networks like going on Facebook and searching for your brand. Better yet, get a trial of a social monitoring software and see what people are saying across the social networks. You will be amazed how much publicity your brand gets, even though you don’t know about it.

To have at least some space in the dialogue, you must engage with the customers. Everyone of us views the social media as an extension of his personal space and doesn’t care about your brand. The only two ways to become relevant to the customer on the social network is to be either useful or funny. Nothing else works. Which road will you choose?

Right off the bat: let me invite you to Social Marketers Summit. It is a conference about social media taking place in Prague on 9 September, 2010 at Slovanský Dům (Na Příkopě 859/22, 110 00 Prague 1).

No matter in what city or country you live in, a conference or a workshop dedicated to online PR and social media is bound to happen near you. Most of them are average at best and remind the visitors of pre-ordained kabuki. A local icon or a social media guru comes on stage and starts going on and on about “the challenges facing the marketing and PR industry in the age of new media and user-generated content”, while boring the audience to sleep. This summit isn’t going to be like that.

As every conference depends on the people who organise it, I believe this one is set up for success. Behind the scenes are Pavel Hacker from Viral Booster and Jakub Svoboda from tyinternety.cz, the Czech equivalent of Mashable. Both are very industrious and open-minded individuals. Besides, they have been to a countless number of boring conferences, so they know what to avoid.

It’s not only about the organizers, though. Social Marketers Summit will have a plenty of interesting people who will feed our minds with interesting topics. I’m looking forward to these three speakers. I am sure there will be more

Erica Swallow, an Editorial Assistant at Mashable: Community projects on the rise we have not heard about much yet. I have no idea what I should imagine under the title of this presentation, but it sounds intriguing.

Marek Prchal, a freelance idea maker: PR and social media in commercial sector. This man is a Czech social media trailblazer and it would be very interesting to hear about the thought processes and assumptions that have led to his innovative campaings.

Josef Slerka, the chief of R&D at Ataxo Interactive: Seeing is believing, measuring is knowing. The social media, and especially online PR is suffering from the lack of clear and objective measurement. Josef’s talk isn’t likely to bring anything new into the discussion, but I am hoping to learn how to set the objectives in a way, so they can be tracked and measured.

Update: Josef will not talk about measurement and analytics – I misunderstood what he is going to talk about. The speech bears the title of Selling users is good business. As far as I know, the speech should be geared towards utilising data mined from the social media.

I hope that I gave you enough of reasons for visiting the conference. For more information, look at www.socialsummit.cz or their Facebook page.

The web-based Twitter client HootSuite has made significant changes to its interface mainly aimed at improving user experience. The HootSuite crew has built in GoogleAnalytics for tweets for immediate feedback on your social media campaigns. Interface hasn’t remained unchanged either – you can choose from three new themes. The Twitter client also enables geographic location search, drag and drop upload and better interaction with Facebook.

Evidently, HootSuite aspires to become a favourite tool of internet marketers and thanks to integrating GoogleAnalytics, it will achieve its goal soon. Integration of GA into HootSuite beats TweetDeck by a mile. The owners of HTML 5 enabled browsers are going to be very happy. The new HootSuite enables them to look for location-specific tweets.

I have never been in favour of the new re-tweet structure adopted by Twitter a couple of months ago. It makes it difficult to see who is re-tweeting what and it somehow diminishes transparency. Plus, you keep wondering what are some strangers you haven’t followed doing in your stream. Unfortunately, now HootSuite has adopted it as well.

All in all, the changes are fine and I like the fact that the navigation is dependent on a cute owl-looking launch button. HootSuite is turning from yet another Twitter client to a professional social media tool. I am wondering what TweetDeck comes up with to counter this development.

As it happens, companies sometimes slip up when it comes to social media outreach to bloggers.  That very thing has happened to Pepsi when it pitched Darren Rowse. Their PR people or “social media specialists” sent out an e-mail blast and expected favourable coverage, which will never come from Darren. Instead he did what every upset blogger or journalist does once in a while – retorted with a stinging message and posted it online.

I am sure that the social media people at Pepsi are sweating but all in all, it’s not so bad. Bad practices should be called out once in a while. Only that way we will improve and legitimise social media outreach as a self-regulating practice.

There are two surefire ways to succeed with your brand on social networks. The entity you represent on Facebook or LinkedIn or other niche social networks has to provide either extremely funny or extremely useful content. Otherwise, your brand will never manage to engage its consumers. That principle doesn’t apply only to social media marketing, it also holds for viral application.

Be funny

I’m sure there is no shortage of brands that are trying to be funny on social networks, however only a handful succeed. The best example is the Will it blend? series sponsored by Blendtec. Tom Dickson has managed to take a seemingly boring brand and transform it into a viral sensation.

It began as an accident, as quite a few good campaigns and inventions do. Dickson was testing the new model of the blender by making it grind pine boards. A marketer saw an opportunity in this activity and brought in a camera. Later, they blended marbles, rake handle, a Cochicken (Coke and chicken) resulting in the first videos of the Will it blend? series.

The personality of Tom Dickson was the key to success. His nonchalant demeanor and jokes after pulverising an item unfortunate enough to be in the CEO’s proximity are a guarantee of fun, so that’s why the series attracts a multitude of viewers. The most notable videos that got stuck in my mind were when Dickson was grinding the iPhone to smithereens and when he tried to blend a Chuck Norris action figure. Both were brilliant due to different reasons. The former case revolved around a well-known product, while the latter rode the wave of hype.

Think about it from a financial point of view. The amount of money Blendtec spent on the viral videos is insignificant. You wouldn’t be able to buy an ad for the production costs of the whole series. On the other hand, the series has become a phenomenon and generated more money to the company than an average advertising campaign.

This only proves that a good idea is all what matters in marketing.

Next week, we will take a look at brands generating their publicity online from being useful to their audiences on social networks.

Image credit: Wikipedia

They say the devil is in the details and that’s twice as valid in the world of social web, where your site is constantly scrutinized by impertinent perceptive users. Details like an announcement of regular maintenance or a 404 page also send a message about your brand. The job of every marketer is to keep the eyeballs on the web page despite the negative circumstances (server down, the user didn’t find what he wanted).

One way to do it is to go with humor. HootSuite came up with a catchy maintenance screen that displaces the usual response to maintenance screens. Instead of reacting in a “Damn, I hate this!” manner, the image makes you feel entertained, so you don’t associate negative feelings with the brand.

What do you think about it? Do you have any other examples of the effective anger displacement on the web?

Jyri Engestrom and Hugh MacLeod already talked enough about them. Let me take their already twisted definition, relate it to an ordinary experience and beat it to the pulp.

My version of “define:social object”

People don’t connect to other people. People connect to certain objects and thanks to those objects, they meet other people connected to the same object. Thus, social object is something that facilitates peer-to—peer connections.

English, please!

That seems confusing. Let’s show it on an example? Think of a bottle of wine and two people who don’t know each other very well in a room. Both of them start sipping the wine and getting a bit anxious. You know the awkward feeling when you are with someone you don’t know. As the pressure to communicate grows and minutes seem to turn to days, this conversation is bound to happen.

A: *slurrp* “So, what do you think of this wine?”
B: “It’s lovely. Only Chateau Cheval Blanc leaves such a distinctive aftertaste”
A: “Yes, I drank it once in Bordeaux when I was vacationing there a week ago.”
B: “Oh, Bordeaux… We went there with my friend last month. I absolutely love France in this time of year. Did you visit…”

We could go on like that forever but you already get the gist of what I’m trying to say about the social object. It is safe to assume that the bottle of wine is in this case a social object because it connects those two people in the room.

One more situation

Here is another example for you. Imagine a guy with an iPhone playing with a cool app. Some other man sees him and takes a closer look at the app. He falls in love with it on a first sight and starts talking to the guy who is playing with the iPhone. They will be probably talking about the iPhone and apps. On the flip side, if there were no iPhone and no cool apps, those two people would have never connected to each other.

In case you are still struggling with what a social object is, let me give you a simple homebrew definition for it.

A social object is a lubricant of human relationships – it helps you connect, share and smoothen the edges in communication.

Yeah, so what?

Why should marketers bother with social objects? Because “social object” is just another name for your brand. By definition, your job is to make your product / brand attractive enough to become remarkable. By fostering conversations around it in the realm of social media, you will increase popularity of your brand / product and we, the consumers, will like it more. Thus, we’ll buy more of it – a marketer’s dream!

So go out there and start creating social objects.

Image credit: lwallenstein, Laughing Squid

Seth Godin recently spoke at the TED convention. He talked about tribes and power of the ideas. Check out the video.

• Everything is about leadership nowadays
• Being a leader makes you a leader
• Humans are desperate for connecting with others
• If the marketers manage to be passionate about the product and connect people, they will succeed
• Mass marketing is dead

Share  your perspective with others! Tell us what you think.

Image credit: inquisitr

I dedicated last month to improving my blog. It was a part of Darren Rowse’s 31 Days to Build a Better Blog Challenge. Let me share with you the results of my effort.

About 31DBBB

The composition of audience surprised me. There were only few PR and marketing bloggers. Most of the participants blogged about freelance writing, healthy lifestyle, or they were “stay at home moms.” I had expected more marketers joining the challenge.

The program was well structured. The e-mails Darren was sending us were clear, concise and easy to read. The posts at Problogger were not cluttered with meaningless pseudo-information. They were to the point, yet comprehensive. It is my fervent hope that Copyblogger would pick up on this program and create its own version focused on becoming better writers. That would be awesome!

Content

Most of the daily tasks were focused on research and writing good content. I tried to support all the writing tasks with articles from Copyblogger, and the research tasks with some literature from my marketing classes and Jeremiah Owyang’s posts.

Even though I knew a lot of things Darren was writing about in terms of writing well and editorial planning, some of his ideas really added value to my blog. Creating a sneeze page made me finally finish the series on “Job Hunt!” New posts on cover letter writing are coming soon.

Added value

What I deemed as the best about this project was the opportunity to network. All the bloggers participating in the challenge united at the forum to exchange experiences, ideas and links to their best work. This has increased everyone’s traffic, as well as contact base. I’m in touch with several blogging buddies, like Kirsten Wright or Michael Cowen because of this program, and I love it. They are both very inspiring. In the aspect of networking, Darren’s challenge was invaluable.

Drawbacks

To my taste, the program could have focused more on promotion techniques and writing. Sometimes, I felt it was trying to master the obvious. The tasks could have been more challenging and writing-centred.

Overall

The last month proved to be great not only in terms of extending my social network, helping my blog to stand out, and writing good content. It has also affirmed me that I’ve been doing many things connected to blogging right. I thank Darren for the wonderful opportunity and his time.

As a closing remark, let me encourage everyone to take part in programs like these. The benefits of increased network and improved blog clearly outweigh the time costs associated with the challenge.