Social Media Austin — Michelle's Blog

Apr 22

If Your Customers Could Automatically Hear Your Product’s Story, What Would They Hear?

April 22, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

As cool as the concept is of new media, there are still some really great shows on old media. As of late, I have been fascinated by the NBC Show “Heroes”. A little late to the game I know, but hey, it’s better late than never.

On “Heroes”, there is a psychopathic killer named Sylar who kills other characters that have special abilities just so he can have them for himself. One of the abilities he acquired is the ability to sense an object or person’s history just by touching it.

Think about walking into a store and knowing where food was grown, where a garment was made, and who put it on the shelf. Think about your computers, cars, houses or antiques. Think about touching a person and knowing all the good and the bad he or she had ever done. If you could have this at your fingertips, would you even want it?

Every product and service has a story somewhere. As more and more information about these products and services comes out on the internet, you won’t have to be Sylar to figure out if it’s good or bad. You’ll know that your Puma shoes were made by young women working long hours for very little money. You’ll know that while the CMO of Unilever preaches about how marketers no longer own their brands, Unilever still produces “food” with trans-fat, which chemically isn’t a food at all and is a huge cause of cardiovascular disease. Whoops.

Some of these stories will be excessively harsh and sensationalistic. Some won’t be harsh enough. Eventually, there get to be enough stories to help you form a clearer idea of the truth. For in the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, “Perspectival seeing is the only kind of seeing there is, perspectival ‘knowing’ is the only kind of ‘knowing’, and the more feelings we get about a matter which we allow to come to expression, the more eyes, different eyes through which we are able to view the same matter, the more complete our ‘conception’ of it, our ‘objectivity’ will be.”

This isn’t speculation and is based on empirical evidence. Statistics show that there are more and more people participating on the web in every region and demographic. Internet and social media usage is going up in every single age demographic according to a Pew Research report. In just eight years, internet usage has increased over 1100 percent in Africa and 1296 percent in the Middle East. Twitter is a great way to find trends and opinions, and has gone from one million users to over ten million in one year.

Look around you. If you could hear the story of items around you by touching them or reading about them on the internet, would you like what you heard?

*P.S. Hopefully NBC won’t ask me to take this post down. Watch “Heroes” on Mondays at 9 PM EST/8 PM CST.

Apr 17

Why Old Media IS NOT in the Grave

April 17, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

Yesterday I went to an Austin Social Media Club meeting entitled “Old Media Rises from the Grave”. While I must admit that the vast expense of print and TV production will inevitably push them to a web-based platform, this hasn’t happened yet. TV still pummels online content in terms of sheer influence. Don’t believe me? Here are stats:

1.) Often it feels like online time eats into our TV time. Not so. According to a Nielsen Research report, online consumption AND TV time have gone up. From Q3’07 to Q3’08, TV consumption went up 4.1% for TV and internet consumption went up 5.7%. Only among internet early adopters did TV consumption go down. At what expense? As sad as this is, it is at the expense of our families and our waistlines.

2.) In a McPheters and Company study, eye tracking studies showed that 63% of internet ads weren’t even seen by respondents. Magazines had ad recall almost three times that of Internet banner ads. To top it off, net recall of TV ads was almost twice that of magazine ads. So basically, although they are cheaper, internet ads are just about entirely forgotten by the majority of people.

3.) In terms of sheer volume, old media has new media beat. If I advertise on one episode of American Idol, my ad has the potential of going out to over 24,000,000 people. That’s 24 MILLION active viewers, and the chances of them actually retaining the benefits of my product are much higher. Consider shameless product placement like Ford and Coca-Cola, and the net exposure is even bigger.

If I ask Ashton Kutcher to plug my product in his million person Twitter feed, 1.) I’d probably have to pay him and 2.) those are subscribers, not active viewers. So I wouldn’t have to pay as much, but I wouldn’t get nearly the bang I would get from American Idol. Traditional media just has numbers on its side…for now.

Although new media allows for a much more personable approach to marketing, you have to consider the here and now. And the here and now is saying that people still like shows, news, and everything new media people say is “dead’. Good content drives traffic, no matter it’s source. Right now, the silent majority of people are still watching TV (including myself) and are still looking at passive forms of media. This means my CPM can be lower than it is with online media because although my costs are higher, my impressions are as well.

The two biggest questions marketers must ask are 1.) Where are the people who would benefit from my product and 2.) Where are the influencers that would help promote my product, whether professionally or as consumers? If I’m promoting software for developers, 99.9% of TV shows are stupid avenues. For the majority products however, it is naive and even dangerous to think that old media is completely “dead”. Just because you are an early adopter, it doesn’t mean that the people who pay your paycheck are as well.

austin social media austin social media club integrated marketing integrated media integrated social media Michelle Greer old media grave Social Media Austin social media marketing austin Social Networking Austin tv statistics View Comments

Mar 04

Is Twitter Mainstream Yet? No (and That’s Okay).

March 4, 2009 • View Comments • Twitter

From all reports, social media is going nowhere but up in every age demographic and geographic place. Twitter gets mentioned on CNN from time to time. Even FoxNews makes its usual mockery of it. With all this traditional press, is Twitter going mainstream?

There is no mainstream media anymore. And that is okay.

Due to the low barriers of entry the internet introduces, anyone can be “media”. There are many channels that can be used to introduce media and like Twitter, they can be created quickly and for little expense. This results in segmented media or niche media, a concept Wired Magazine editor Chris Anderson calls “the long tail”.

Put it in perspective: Figures are not exact, but back in the day, up to 109 million people purchased Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” album. 24.56 million people in the U.S. alone watched American Idol just last Wednesday. 95 million people watched this last SuperBowl. Twitter has just under 6 million users despite being 100% free and unlike the SuperBowl, international. It’s not mainstream. That is okay.

Why is that okay? Because unlike other traditional mainstream sources, there is no overhead associated with it. The SuperBowl ad GoDaddy put out cost them at least $3 million. The Twitter contests I run for NameCheap, a rival registrar, cost around $15000. I can’t reach 95 million people, but I don’t have to because my costs are 200 times less. I am appealing to a niche, and since Twitter seems to be full of people who are at their computers a lot and therefore buy a lot of domains, it’s a much more targeted approach than the machine gun approach of a SuperBowl ad.

When printing presses were rare, the only book people could get their hands on was the Bible. It was “the mainstream” of the time. As printing presses were created en masse, people could increasingly print information that was more specialized to a local area or subject. We now have a medium (the internet) that allows people to create all sorts of different types of content in all sorts of forms. The overhead is lower, so more people publish in more ways and in different subjects. The diversity of media is amazing these days. In this way, the internet is destroying what we formerly knew of mainstream. When you tell someone that Twitter is now “mainstream”, please bare in mind the common perception of what mainstream actually is and the numbers associated with it (Michael Jackson, Super Bowl, Coca Cola, etc.).

Not everyone is going to like Twitter. Some people like videos. Some people like LiveJournal. My sister has a whole community on Flickr. Go to the DMV for ten minutes, look around, and tell me you are excited for Twitter to go mainstream. Media is segmented, will be segmented, and that is okay.

internet marketing internet media mainstream media Michelle Greer Social Media Austin social media mainstream social media marketing twitter mainstream twitter marketing View Comments

Jan 28

Why Mark Cuban’s “Great Internet Video Lie” is Merely a Delusion

January 28, 2009 • View Comments • Social Media and Society

Mark Cuban wrote a long post explaining why a TV show that merely asks for 10,000 viewers at once would not scale on the internet. Due to the lack of Content Delivery Networks that could actually stream this amount of content (which is low by TV standards), having a show with this many viewers is not feasible. Cuban calls this “the Great Internet Video Lie”.

That’s stupid.

Cuban is working under the assumption that people actually create internet content to even get 10,000 viewers or that all viewers must come at once. Some people are trying to pull in a lot of viewers. This is true. However, some people are trying to pull in targeted viewers. A targeted viewer is much more valuable to an advertiser than someone who tunes out an ad because it is dumbed down for the masses.

Think about it this way: imagine you are Gogol Bordello (one of my favorite bands) and you want to perform somewhere. You can perform on Letterman, a show many people have not watched in years but gets well more than 10,000 viewers easily, or you could perform for a popular video blog dedicated to punk music. The video blog 1.) is more likely to promote you as you actually appeal to their audience, 2.) will be more likely to have watchers who will actually buy your album and go to your shows and 3.) can archive the footage so you can get more views later. So perhaps you won’t get 10,000 views today, but you could get a million targeted views from people who are actually searching for you over the next year.

The low overhead associated with video content online allows people to create niche sites that would not survive the very cost prohibitive TV. Niche content mean very targeted ads. One targeted customer is worth more than ten customers who are editing out your ads with their DVR or going on a bathroom break.

Internet will do to TV stations what cable channels did to NBC, CBS, and ABC. It will force them to create good content and will shrink their influence on modern culture. How this is a lie is beyond me, but Mark Cuban also thought this was a good haircut, so your guess is as good as mine.

blog maverick future shows internet future video internet mark cuban Michelle Greer Social Media Austin the great internet video lie View Comments

Jan 07

Seven Things You Probably Did Not Know About Me

January 7, 2009 • View Comments • Meet People in Austin

Apparently Sara Dornsife, a partner of crime of mine here in Austin, feels either 1.) ridiculously compelled to pass along chain blog posts or 2.) thinks you should know more about me. I’m voting for #1 but humoring you anyway.

So here goes:

1.) I’m the youngest of seven kids. My parents were Catholic and apparently glutton for punishment. I have three sisters and three brothers. I like to think they stopped only when they finally got it right.

2.) My dad was in the Air Force, which meant my family moved around a lot. I’m surprised my parents didn’t completely forget one of us somewhere.

3.) While at Dell, I was notorious for a being on the other line of a man calling in to buy a computer so he could “look at porn”. I figured he could use a fair amount of RAM and a good processor as well as a nice monitor. The call was recorded and the managers all laughed while listening to it.

4.) In college, I was a bit of a hippie and bought my clothes at resale shops aside from underwear and socks. I soon gave up after writing a senior thesis on sweatshop labor and realizing that being a Nike laborer is a lot nicer than working all day in a rice paddy.

5.) I was interviewed by Ananda on MTV. The crowning achievement of my career.

6.) My boyfriend is from another country. Oooh, who is he?

7.) I love writing six real facts about me and one fake one and making you guess which one is a lie.

So now, so the blogosphere really gets to know each other, I’m passing this on. Hugh MacLeod, Cody Marx Bailey, Alex Jones, Ryan Joy, Ed Schipul, Giovanni Gallucci, and Mike Chapman, it’s your turn.

blog chain letter blog personalities bloggers austin bloggers texas Michelle Greer Michellesblog Social Media Austin social media experiment social media expert social media marketing View Comments

Jan 05

Everything I Learned About Marketing I Learned from my Garden

January 5, 2009 • View Comments • Online Marketing

One day I went to Home Depot and found a yellow rose bush for five bucks. Most traditional roses do very poorly in Austin because we don’t get the rain they need and it gets too hot for them. For five bucks though, I couldn’t resist.

I did some research on the variety and figured it would last through the spring, but that I’d have to trim back for summer. No worries. Unlike many roses in the United States that are cross bred for their looks at the expense of their smell, this rose had a sweet aroma that struck you every time you passed by. Worth the risk.

I gave it rose food, plenty of water, and put it in a good spot with just the right amount of sun. And sure enough, I had a huge yellow rose bush that all my neighbors loved. It was every Texan’s dream.

So how does this relate to marketing campaigns?

Preparation is key. Before you plant anything, you want to make sure the soil is the right pH for the plant. You should lay down some compost to enrich the soil. I’ve seen products launched before they were ready and the result is a disaster. You can try to be agile, but if people already have it in their minds that your product sucks, you could be doomed. Or at least, having to work a lot harder than you should have to be.

Some businesses will be doomed from the start if you don’t know where to put them. English roses are beautiful. I’d be an idiot to put English roses in Austin because we get a fraction of the rain they get. I’d really be stupid to put it out in full sun and somewhere far from me where I couldn’t water it easily. Where are you marketing your company? Are you putting it in the right target audience? Putting a company in an inappropriate spot is just wrong, because everyone else in that company is working hard to build the product, and you are squandering it by not putting it out there to the people who want it.

Certain businesses need certain elements to grow. Roses generally need very acidic soil. They generally do best with rose food. Are you supporting your team properly? Do they have the tools and knowledge they need? Do your customers have the information they need to differentiate your product from someone else’s?

Don’t be lazy. If you clip roses back, they grow back stronger. If you water them regularly, you get better results. Having a routine helps you figure out what you’ve done and what you need to do. This could be checking analytics, reading blogs, or sending newsletters.

Plant at the right time, and diversify. Yesterday I ate a salad from the lettuce I’m growing in the side yard. I want to plant zucchini, but you just don’t plant zucchini when its cold. It just doesn’t get what it needs when it needs it and it can’t take the frost. If you have to wait to launch a campaign for the right moment, wait. It could give you exponentially better results.

Don’t grow what you don’t understand. If I moved, you better believe I’d be studying up on my zone before wasting my money on plants. Home Depot makes a fortune off of people who couldn’t tell you the difference between a perennial and an annual. These people pick based on “what is pretty”. If all the bloggers are talking about an industry, don’t just decide you want to do marketing for that company because “it’s shiny”. You could end up with nothing but a pile of dead snapdragons in your yard and a huge balance on your Home Depot card.

Be prepared for the worst. I was out of town and it snowed out of nowhere. My neighbor, who shares the plot with me, didn’t cover my basil and I lost all of it. I should have told him to watch out for it but was not anticipating such wacky weather. Sometimes disaster strikes when you least suspect it. That’s why it’s important to know every objection for why someone would buy your product before you go in. It’s also important to have a strategy if your budget gets cut. Bad things will happen.

Pick and maintain relationships with your partners, affiliates, employees and any alliances wisely. Why is that rose bush dead now? Because I moved out of my ex-boyfriend’s house, and he purposely killed it. The little boys across the street would have no more random roses to deliver to their mother. One person can really poison a campaign if they want to.

And most importantly, if you don’t like it or can’t grow to like it, don’t grow it. It doesn’t matter if you have a great spot for a particular type of bush. If you don’t like that bush, don’t grow it. By working for a company whose products you don’t believe in, your campaigns will never be as good as those done for a company you love. Remember that.

marketing campaign marketing launch Michelle Greer Michellesblog plan marketing campaign plan marketing launch Social Media Austin social media campaigns social media expert social media marketing View Comments

Mar 30

A Productive Day One at WordCamp Dallas

March 30, 2008 • View Comments • Events I've Attended

There is nothing like reconstituted egg product at the Frisco Hampton Inn and hanging out with a bunch of fellow geeks with MacBooks to get the ideas flowing. I was a bit worried that WordCamp Dallas would not be worth missing out on a weekend in Austin, TX, but here are some of great ideas/announcements that came about at WordCamp Dallas:

1.) According to John P., I finally need to update the look and plugins of this blog so it does not suck.
2.) Andy Skelton wants to have a “rate my neighbor” Google maps mashup that allows you to see if your neighbors are total duds. Aaron Brazell thinks we should have a “rate that driver” application that allows you to call out crappy drivers by their license plate number.
3.) B5Media’s VP of Social Engineering, Ed, is a former diplomat and a total social media guru. Look for his ideas on how to kickstart your career using social media on Twitter soon.
4.) Will Andy Skelton allow me to whisper sweet nothings to you in your WordPress dashboard? Doubtful.
5.) Oh yeah, some guy named Matt Mullenweg announced the WordPress 2.5 launch 20 minutes after it happened. Then he gave insights as to what would be in 2.6 for the first time ever. Well, whoopidy do!

Look for more news from me, Ryan Joy, Paul Menard, Jen Simmons and Jeff. I’m hoping they don’t release the official WordPress mascot, Pressly the grizzly bear. That got kind of ugly last time, from what I heard.

blogging expoert Matt Mullenweg Michelle Greer Michellesblog Previous Events Social Media Austin social media expert Social Networking Austin social networking consultant WordCamp WordCamp Dallas WordCampDallas WordPress 2.5 Wordpress 2.5 Launch Wordpress 2.6 View Comments

Mar 26

Everydotconnects Post Inspires Michelle’s First Official Rant

March 26, 2008 • View Comments • Politics and Current Events

OK, double pings here, I read Connie Reece’s post “Five White Men Talk About Social Media” which was inspired by “X Chromosome Web 2.0 Rock Stars“. Essentially, the observation is that we continually see the same men in the social media world, and although we like these men, we would like to see more women.

Why does the lack of prominent women in social media surprise anyone?

We’ve never seen a female U.S. President. Great Britain elected a female Prime Minister in Margaret Thatcher. Indira Gandhi served as Prime Minister of India. Finland, a country with the highest number of scientists per capita in the world, elected Conan O’Brien look-alike Tarja Halonen as president. Although the Catholics in Argentina will not see a female priest, they did elect Cristina Fernandez de Kirschner, who is following in the footsteps of her husband and former president Nestor. Pakistan, a primarily Muslim nation, elected Benazir Bhutto as Prime Minister in 1988 and she was leading another election until she was assassinated last December. This is supposedly the freest place on Earth for women, and yet, a Muslim nation elected a female for a leader 20 years before we even get a viable candidate for President. Should we be surprised we can’t get a woman on a City Council social media panel? Nope.

There are very few female CEOs. There is one woman on the Supreme Court. There are 14 women in the Senate. These are decision makers. Are there issues they face that impact women much differently than men? Yes. Are there people that seriously believe women are poor decision makers, consciously or subconsciously? Unfortunately, yes.

Many commenters on Connie’s post said that it is much more natural for men to promote themselves than women. I’d say so. I’ve worked in the tech and auto industries since I graduated from college. I have not had a female boss since I was 18 and I worked in a restaurant. Everyone ahead of me has been male, and many of my female, straight counterparts get married, have kids and then stay at home. It often feels as if the cards are stacked against us.

This rant being said, that doesn’t mean that the social media world should simply follow suit. On the contrary, if social media can produce viable, relevant female “celebrities”, it would bring more attention to online media than ever. These would have to be progressive thinkers, capable of instituting substantive change both in and out of the online space. Any takers?

connie reese female bloggers females social media females social networking gender social media Michelle Greer Michellesblog online celebrities Online Networking Social Media Austin social media celebrities Social Networking Austin women bloggers women social media women social networking women sxsw interactive women sxswi View Comments

Latest Tweets

Categories

Blogroll