We're not a company that understands social media, but we play one on TV

Staples recently dipped their foot into the social media waters in an effort to brand themselves as a personal data security and identity theft resource. They put out word of blogger events in New York City and San Francisco, featuring personal security and safety expert Bill Stanton, who is a contributor to NBC “Today” and Dateline.

The event was a sit-down between bloggers and Bill, who riffed on his experiences "stealing" identities to expose just how easy that is to do. (Bill is a great speaker, if you're doing a high-profile event on security, find him and hire him).

Coburn Communications handled the event for Staples.

"As a way to generate word-of-mouth buzz among highly influential mom, young professional, and small business bloggers, as well as local online media, Staples enlisted Coburn to execute a blog-specific event in two markets – San Francisco and New York," said Coburn's Kate Tuller.

Basic PR approach: get the influencers in the same room with the products, deliver a controlled message, make them feel important and welcome, make it easy for them to talk about that message.

WHAT THEY DID RIGHT:
In addition to the star power, the Coburn people rolled out the red carpet. Great location, free food, drinks and a gift bag full of the products they'd talked about, such as a lock-down cable and anti-virus software. They introduced the concepts, wined and dined us, then provided product so that the bloggers could use them, and therefore increase the likelihood of an educated post to promote said products. Bill gave a short presentation, then fielded questions about security and knocked it out of the park with his encyclopedic knowledge of how people will try to rip you off.

WHAT THEY DID WRONG:
The purpose of this event was to bring out bloggers and get some online exposure. Yet my first email with questions about the event was sent Feb. 26, and I did not receive a response until March 10, two weeks later. That's like fifteen years in internet time. Everyone is busy, but if you throw an event for bloggers, then can't answer questions for two weeks, you're missing the point. I had to prompt them three times for a response in that time period. And when I did get an response, they said they couldn't answer most of the questions I asked.

Here are the list of questions provided to Coburn.

1. Where did you get the idea for this event?
2. What cities and why? Why not more cities?
3. Describe the need for an in-person event, as opposed to some kind of online event. We really only saw the shredder work, which could have been done with online video, instead of the expense of the face-to-face event. Tell me about that choice. Tuller's Answer: Bloggers, as you know, love networking…it was a chance to provide them this opportunity as well as educate and provide useful information and products on identity theft, data loss, and internet threats. Face-to-face events are also better for relationship building.
   
4. How are you defining and tracking success? At what point will Staples say "this was money well spent?" This is the most important question for my blog -- how does the customer (Staples) define when they got their money's worth?
5. What does an event like yours, put on by a big company like Staples, say about corporate America's valuation of "mom-and-pop" bloggers? There was no Scoble, no Technorati at the event, is that what you were hoping for?
6. Who's idea was it to bring in Bill? Was this event a Coburn brainstorm, or a Staples idea and they brought you in to manage?

Tuller said she was not at liberty to answer most of these questions. Now to people in social media, these seem pretty harmless. This is basic information. Am I wrong here? Not at liberty to say who came up with the idea? What? Not at liberty to say why you're targeting mom-and-pop bloggers? Huh? I'm not asking for secret Pentagon documents here folks, I just want to know more about the event ... so I can blog about it ... which was the point of the event in the first place, no?

When you shine the spotlight of measurement and profitability at social media promotions, most of the time people retreat into the shadows. The culture of openness and transparency is embedded throughout social media, yet we still find companies using the tools without embracing the spirit.

Is this Coburn's fault? Probably not. They are a vendor. Is it Staples fault? Probably. Staples is old-school big business. The concept of answering simple questions and not just regurgitating what they tell people to say must be very frightening and confusing to them.

I would have read more about the corporate culture on a Staples blog, but oddly enough ... I couldn't find one. So Staples apparently doesn't have to understand social media in order to use it to sell stuff.

DOES IT SELL STUFF?
Staples won't say. That's a shame. The event did seem to produce some hits in the blogosphere, as evidenced by the IceRocket.com blog search below. I searched for "Bill Stanton" and "Staples" and came up with six hits. Not exactly a viral explosion, but not bad at all. Coburn got the blog hits, and that's the first step because you never know when a message will resonate and be picked up in other places.

Does it sell books? St. Martin's Press says "sho' nuff."

It's getting harder and harder to find examples where social media does, actually, sell stuff. One area where it is NOT hard to find examples is in publishing. Now I'm a bit biased here, as I landed a book deal with Crown Publishing specifically because I sold a few thousands books on my own using nothing but social media (so this is a simultaneous full & open disclosure, combined with a shameless self-promoting plug -- the best of both sides of social media in one fell swoop).

But outside of the unique success stories of social media rags-to-riches stories like David Wellington and David Wong, let's take a look at how a big-time publisher used it to sell books.

Now right off the bat, our example blurs the lines, because the example is RULE THE WEB by Mark Frauenfelder, published by St. Martin's Press. If you haven't heard of this guy, he's a co-founder and regular blogger for BoingBoing.net. If you haven't heard of BoingBoing.net, put down your abacus and stable the horse, it's time for you to get caught up. BoingBoing.net is arguably the most-read blog on the planet (and since we only know of blogs on this planet, that makes it the most-read blog in the universe ... nice work, Mark!).

So clearly, Fraunefelder (pictured at right) is a digital native with a big following of other digital natives. Even so, St. Martin's didn't rely on that alone to sell the book.

"We built a dedicated Web site for it," said David Moldawer, editor of RULE THE WEB. "We used a blog to offer the same advice as the book, as well as a live podcast with interviews and a traditional, short, regular podcast with Web tips."

They built the blog with TypePad, and hosted the podcast with BlogTalkRadio. They tried leverage Fraunfelder's name along with the book's website to multiple channels.

"We did extensive blogger outreach, both to people in our personal networks as well as to bloggers in the lifehack/Web tip arena," Moldawer said.

RULE THE WEB peaked at #2 on Amazon's "Computers & Internet" list, and hit #51 overall.

When it comes to these results, it's impossible to tell if social media links happened because of the book's content, or because of Frauenfelder's status as internet royalty.

"It hit those peaks when the book was mentioned on sites like Lifehacker and 43 Folders," Moldawer said.

And, of course, Fraunfelder posted about the book on BoingBoing.net, but the big sales peaks came when other heavyweight sites talked about the book.

"While Mark's own posting about the book on Boing Boing certainly also boosted sales on Amazon, the mentions on the other Top 100 lifehack sites definitely had a sharper effect," Moldawer said. "The lesson, which many of us already know, is that having other people talk about you is always more effective than talking about yourself."

And don't forget the obligatory video book promo on YouTube. The one listed here generated some 13,000+ views.

JUDGEMENT: DOES IT SELL BOOKS?
Hard to say. Frauenfelder would have sold a boat-load of books with or without the extra efforts by St. Martin's Press. The spike charting on Amazon that coincided with online media mentions in Lifehacker and 43Folders, however, does point to a strong correlation.

Those mentions, though, are more PR than social media initiatives - if you count Lifehacker as an established media outlet, which I do. Getting a post in Lifehacker is not a "social media initiative," - it's the same things as a New York Times book review, an established media source talking about a product.

Podcast sponsorship example: Skepticality and Skeptic Magazine

Podcasts are the wave of the future! They will kill radio dead. They will kill TV dead (okay, that's a "vidcast," but roll with me here). They are the cornerstone of user-generated media that will unleash an avalanche of talent upon the world! Die, evil global big media, DIE!

Oh wait, sorry -- that mantra is from 2005. And, let's be honest, that prediction ranks right up there with the 49ers winning the Super Bowl this year. Gobal big media seems to be doing okay. At least that's what Rupert Murdoch told me last week right before we bumped fists and he said "word is bond."

So podcasts haven't taken over the world, not just yet -- but do they sell stuff? For niche companies selling niche products to niche demographics, the answer seems to be "yes." One case in point is Skeptic Magazine, which has turned a sponsorship with the podcast Skepticality into a circulation-increasing endeavor.

Skeptic Magazine is a publication of the non-profit Skeptic Society, an organization that promotes critical thinking and espouses the values of science as opposed to myths, magic and charlatans of all makes and models. Skepticality is a podcast that, no surprise here, covers the same content. Hosted by Derek Colanduno and Robynn "Swoopy" McCarthy, Skepticality was heavily featured very early on iTunes when the iTunes podcasting page came online. The show quickly generated a large following, with an estimated 18,000 listeners tuning in to each episode.

Daniel Loxton is the editor of Junior Skeptic, Skeptic Magazine's sub-title that promotes critical thinking among younger readers. Daniel was a guest on Skepticality in January, 2006.

Daniel Loxton preps a photo shoot for a Jr. Skeptic Magazine cover
"I stumbled across the show through iTunes in about November of 2005," Loxton said. "I liked it right away: it was fun, personal, smart, and noble. So, I wrote the hosts just to let them know I appreciated what they were doing. They then invited me on as a guest. That gave us a social contact we wound up building upon later on."

Social contacts through social media? Who'd have thunk it? The concept of podcasts as information distribution started to circulate around the Skeptic Magazine staff, and Daniel suggested a sponsorship of Skepticality.

"I knew that launching an original new podcast would stretch our resources, and that we had many other important projects we wished to pursue," Loxton said. "Our goal is outreach and education, so getting into the podcast market successfully could carry a risk that for-profit companies might not recognize: we could take audience away from the other skeptical podcasts."

So instead of creating a competing podcast, Skeptic Magazine sponsored Skepticality.

"It was amazing to me to get the validation from Skeptic," Colanduno said. "To me, Dr. (Michael) Shermer and Skeptic Magazine were in my mind the standard for how it should be done. Very little bashing on people, and well put factual information with little to no spin of any sort."

BUT DOES IT SELL STUFF?
So everyone is making nice-nice here, but what's the bottom line?

"The honest answer is that we don't exactly know," Loxton said. "We think it does sell stuff, but we're too small an organization to invest heavily in market research.

"We receive tons of positive feedback from listeners, many of whom tell us they subscribed to Skeptic after listening to the show. This suggests, anecdotally, that it is reaching people. More substantially, the duration of our alliance correlates with a period of healthy growth across the board: for the show, for our online sales of books and lectures, and for Skeptic magazine subscriptions. The problem is that we've made other improvements to our editorial content, our web presence, and our wider media presence, so it's difficult to tease apart the variables."

Hard metrics aren't available, but the marriage of independent podcast and established magazine is a perfect fit for Loxton's marketing checklist.

"Skepticality gives us the capabilities we wanted in the first place," Loxton said. "It gives us the chance to distribute audio educational content for free, worldwide, and to better address topical concerns; the chance to introduce our work to the original audience of Skepticality, and an additional platform for promoting our other efforts and our other allies across the skeptical world."

Social Media: does it get charity stuff?

I call this blog "Does it SELL Stuff," but really it examines social media's impact on the bottom line of any organization. An interesting facet of this is charity work, and seeking donations. Just as in the for-profit sector, social media can generate revenue if it's used correctly -- sheer creative uniqueness doesn't hurt either.

Perhaps only with social media can one man standing in line for four days can result in 100 million free media impressions for a brand, and in selling a single iPhone for $100,000, with the proceeds going to charity.

Enter Johnny Vulkan of marketing agency Anomaly NYC and his innovative work for the charity Keep a Child Alive, or KCA. KCA focuses on generating awareness of the AIDS pandemic in Africa. This isn't a blog about charity, or politics of any kind, so let's just get down to how Vulkan used social media to generate such a windfall for this organization.

Vulkan was the first in line for an iPhone at the Soho Apple Store in New York, NY. Now keep in mind he wasn't the first in line anywhere (that distinction goes to Greg Packer, dubbed the iLoser by the blogosphere), but he was first in line at the Soho store, and he came with a social-media strategy.

Albeit, a spur-of-the-moment strategy.

"We didn't have a lot of planning," Vulkan said. "We put the idea together in a couple of days."

The focal point of that plan was two-fold: first, Apple was tight-lipped about the iPhone and wasn't giving out information; second, the media wanted information, and would take just about any angle they could get on the iPhone's launch.

"We knew the media would be covering the story," Vulkan said. "We knew Apple wouldn't provide any info, but the media was hungry for info about the iPhone."

That gave him an opportunity to get attention and leverage it for the benefit of KCA. The deviously simple plot took the following steps:

• Be first in line, because in social media it's usually only the first mover that gets coverage
  
• Prepare assets that cater to bloggers and social media, particularly photos on Flickr and ready access to links and information about KCA
  
• Watch for coverage of the story, then make those links available so the story is more "discoverable"
  
• Leverage existing relationships with bloggers, and knowledge of the blogger's content, to make them aware of the story

"You can't just ask bloggers to cover something," Vulkan said. "Too many people do that, without understanding what the blog's culture, what they cover, or an understanding the volume of requests that a top blog receives every day."

Vulkan started, of course, by being the first in line at the Soho store. He took a picture to prove it, conveniently branded with the KCA logo, then posted that picture to Flickr.

And that was all it took to get things rolling. Vulkan and Anomaly put out a press release, kept an ongoing photostream of Flickr pictures and made them available to the media. These ready-made assets made it a snap for bloggers to pick up the story, and they did, including key posts in BoingBoing and Gizmodo.

The blogger coverage turned into mainstream media coverage.

"A lot of old media came to the story because conventional journalists use blogs as first-round stimulus for news stories," Vulkan said. "Blog coverage makes the story trickle up to mainstream, then mainstream coverage trickles back down to other blogs."

At all times, the media coverage focused on KCA.

"They (the Keep a Child Alive organization) said it's the highest traffic spike they've ever seen," Vulkan said. "They have a lot of stars helping out, a lot of events, but the iPhone event generated their highest traffic ever."

Vulkan got his iPhone (and got to mug with Spike Lee for the event, but that's just how Johnny rolls), which was, of course, captured on video and uploaded to YouTube (see the video at the top of the story).

The end result? Throw that sucker up on eBay, and a woman from Phoenix drops $100,000k to get it. Oh, and to support Keep A Child Alive. All of this using donated time (four days in line) and free social media tools like Flickr, YouTube, blogs and press releases. And, of course, the social networks Vulkan and Anomaly have established over the years.

BigFix: Leader of the free social marketing world?

"Let's make some viral videos!"

Sure, we've heard that one before. It's easy, right? You just make a video, upload it to YouTube, and the next thing you know you have 250,000 views and the qualified leads are falling from the sky. That, and the Easter Bunny is a CIO with $500k of budget to burn through this quarter.

But there is a reason people want viral video, because once in a great while it hits and it hits big. "Big" as in "Bigfix" and their Ray Hopewood viral video campaigns. You want stats? How about 1.4 million video views, 44 qualified leads and extensive coverage in the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and on NPR (see "related links," below).

The Ray Hopewood campaign began as an extension of BigFix's successful "Software Truth Commission" viral video campaign, conceived by BigFix CEO Dave Robbins and implemented by marketing firm Rassak Experience. That ficticious campaign was set in Washington, D.C., to investigate the heavy-handed billing practices (and over-promises) of big enterprise software companies.

"We needed to do a follow-up given how popular the first series was," said David Appelbaum, VP of Marketing at BigFix. "Given that it was an election year and the software truth commission was in Washington ... not to mention the outsize of egos of so many enterprise software entrepreneurs - a presidential campaign seemed like a natural extension."

BUT DID IT SELL STUFF?
The first Hopewood campaign ran for nine months, and produced 40 qualified leads as well as 250,000 visits to the BigFix site, 370,000 page views and 1.2 million downloads. The entire campaign was bolstered by banner ads on several sites, so it's difficult to say if the Hopewood campaign itself resulted in the new business, or if it was actually a result of banner ads catching a prospect's attention and then driving that prospect to the Hopewood site. That may not be true "viral" exposure, but it's hard to separate elements of a cohesive campaign and say which element was or was not responsible for the new business.

AND DOES IT STILL SELL STUFF?

The new Hopewood for President campaign has only been running for 2.5 months, and has generated 4 qualified new leads along with over 100,000 unique visitors and 125,000 page views on the Hopewood site, 200,000 video views across all sites, and 25 Hopewood swag items sold (Appelbaum said they didn't sell any Hopewood thongs, however). BigFix is thrilled with the numbers, considering that as of yet they've run no banner ads to bolster the campaign.

BESIDES SELLING STUFF, WHAT DID IT DO?
The coverage from the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, NPR and dozens of blogs drew ample attention to the BigFix brand.

"We've gotten better brand coverage than any press release or ad we could ever run, short of an IPO or acquisition announcement," Appelbaum said. "These campaigns encapsulate the irreverence and disruptive nature of our solutions better than anything and so become superb branding exercises."

RELATED LINKS:

• San Francisco Chronicle: Viral video spreading (article on Bigfix)


• NY Times: Campaigning not for your vote but for your dollar


• Media Guerrilla: What's the strategy for making this video viral?


• Brian Sollis: Video news release
  


• Ray Hopewood is on MySpace, just like all the other candidates

Disclaimer: I work for Voce Communications, BigFix is a client of Voce. I learned about the Ray Hopewood campaign during the sales cycle. The bottom line is this is a social media campaign that works and makes money (yeah, it Sells Stuff), so in the blog it goes. Voce Communications had nothing to do with the creation of either Ray Hopewood campaign.

Who cares about my opinion?

Just hold on one dang second. In all this hubbub about the changing face of marketing, and how if you’re not already on the social media bus, you’re being left behind, let’s ask one simple question.

In social media, blogs, podcast, etc. -- what’s actually working?

Who is generating new customers? New sales? New leads? How are they doing it?

I know that social media theory is important. Many of the theorists, such as Brian Solis and Jeremiah Owyang, can really tell you what’s coming up in the mid- and long-term picture. It’s great stuff.

But if you’re like me, you’ve already got a job. A demanding job, full of existing priorities and an Outlook calendar that rings with meeting-makers every five minutes. The concept of a latest “very important” social media tool that I just have to implement or I’ll “miss out on the opportunity” … well … that just plain stresses me out. And, honestly, I’m just too swamped for strategy -- I’d rather know what tools and strategies are being used successfully to generate revenue. Show me a benchmark, show me a functional implementation.

For example, if your company sells $150,000 enterprise installs, do you really think MySpace profile is going to help you generate leads? If a CIO is your entry point into the sale cycle, do you think being active on Facebook is going to help bring in business? And don’t get me started on noisemakers like “Twitter.”

Which brings us to this blog and podcast. I’ll look at companies that are in the trenches, that are implementing blogs, podcasts and other social media tools to communicate corporate vision and generate market share. We’ll look at what works, as well as examine failed initiatives.

This blog will not talk about the latest and greatest social media tool. For that, you just can’t beat Robert Scoble and TechCrunch. It won’t talk about manifestos, paradigm shifts or up-and-coming strategies. If you’ve got that kind of time, go check out people like Solis and Brian Oberkirch.

Me? I’m boring. I just want to know what works. Stay tuned to this blog, and I’ll share that information with you.

-Scott-