Techrigy Blog

From Seth Godin: (highlights mine)

• Anticipated, personal and relevant advertising always does better than unsolicited junk.
• Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
• Your best customers are worth far more than your average customers.
• Share of wallet is easier, more profitable and ultimately more effective a measure than share of market.
• Marketing begins before the product is created.
• Advertising is just a symptom, a tactic. Marketing is about far more than that.
• Low price is a great way to sell a commodity. That’s not marketing, though, that’s efficiency.
• Conversations among the members of your marketplace happen whether you like it or not.
• Good marketing encourages the right sort of conversations.
• Products that are remarkable get talked about.
• Marketing is the way your people answer the phone, the typesetting on your bills and your returns policy.
• You can’t fool all the people, not even most of the time. And people, once unfooled, talk about the experience.
• If you are marketing from a fairly static annual budget, you’re viewing marketing as an expense. Good marketers realize that it is an investment.
• People don’t buy what they need. They buy what they want.
• You’re not in charge. And your prospects don’t care about you.
• What people want is the extra, the emotional bonus they get when they buy something they love.
• Business to business marketing is just marketing to consumers who happen to have a corporation to pay for what they buy.
• Traditional ways of interrupting consumers (TV ads, trade show booths, junk mail) are losing their cost-effectiveness. At the same time, new ways of spreading ideas (blogs, permission-based RSS information, consumer fan clubs) are quickly proving how well they work.
• People all over the world, and of every income level, respond to marketing that promises and delivers basic human wants.
• Good marketers tell a story.
• People are selfish, lazy, uninformed and impatient. Start with that and you’ll be pleasantly surprised by what you find.
• Marketing that works is marketing that people choose to notice.
• Effective stories match the worldview of the people you are telling the story to.
• Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to the others.
• A product for everyone rarely reaches much of anyone.
• Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in an conversation-rich world.
• Marketers are responsible for the side effects their products cause.
• Reminding the consumer of a story they know and trust is a powerful shortcut.
• Good marketers measure.
• Marketing is not an emergency. It’s a planned, thoughtful exercise that started a long time ago and doesn’t end until you’re done.
• One disappointed customer is worth ten delighted ones.
• In the googleworld, the best in the world wins more often, and wins more.
• Most marketers create good enough and then quit. Greatest beats good enough every time.
• There are more rich people than ever before, and they demand to be treated differently.
• Organizations that manage to deal directly with their end users have an asset for the future.
• You can game the social media in the short run, but not for long.
• You market when you hire and when you fire. You market when you call tech support and you market every time you send a memo.
• Blogging makes you a better marketer because it teaches you humility in your writing.

The bolded ones point directly to why we have to monitor social media.

Tags: Marketing, Memes and Trends, Social Media // Add Comment »

A social media release or SMR is a PR tool that takes full advantage of the power of social media for publicizing an event on the web, be it a launch, a human interest story or any newsworthy item. The differences between SMRs and standard releases are significant just as the differences between conventional media (online and off) and social media are significant. In a guest post on Techcrunch, PR pro Brian Solis offers up a useful comparison of several types of press releases including SMRs.

Social media release utilize all the elements of social media including embedded video (demos, executive insight interviews, etc), blog-style writing, images in Flickr-style galleries, extensive linking, network profiles and more. They are typically hosted rather than sent- instead a link to the page (typically on a blog) with the profile is distributed. The social elements in the release are accessible for use by writers covering the story with links openly available. The releases are search optimized with standard keyword techniques.

The challenges involved in utilizing these releases are considerable given that there is far more production required than simply writing a release. However the rewards can also be considerable as these releases offer more value to the media and are, for now before they proliferate, unusual enough to gather some attention.

SM2 will index and discover these releases because they are a part of the social media eco-system that we already track. It will be interesting to track their adoption rate and correlate against our customer base because the people using SM2 tend to be at the forefront of recognizing the importance of social media in the PR and marketing spheres. SM2 can also be used to track the effectiveness of the social media release as its various elements are distributed virally.

Used effectively SMRs could become the cluster bombs of company news distribution, dropping into the social web and then breaking up into individual media elements aimed at all kinds of users.

Tags: Marketing, Memes and Trends, PR, SM2, Social Media // Add Comment »

Political campaigns and politicians’ behavior.

Under the radar stocks and companies.

Natural disasters.

Hugo Chavez and oil prices.

Corn, food and fuel.

It goes on and on endlessly like the world’s biggest cocktail party. Gossip, threats, love, rage, frustration, obsession, fandom, hacks and cracks, stalker video, twits tweeting, bees buzzing.

Google isn’t there…yet. And they can’t tell you what it means, only where it is. And there’s a lot of old stuff that doesn’t matter any more, at least not to this crowd.

So if your name is being bandied about, if your client’s brand is being manhandled or your reputation suddenly got a lot more interesting to someone you’ve never heard of, wouldn’t you have good reasons for wanting to know?

Tags: Memes and Trends, PR, Risk Management, SM2, Social Media // Add Comment »

SM2, Techrigy’s social media monitoring solution, gives you the ability to track and monitor what people are saying about your clients and their brands throughout the social media ecosystem. Blogs, wikis, embedded video (YouTube), microblogs (Twitter) and social networks are where the buzz, good and bad, originates- far before it percolates down to the traditional media. When your agency is pitching new clients (or additional work from existing clients), SM2 becomes an incredibly powerful tool for differentiating you from your competitors.

Monitoring in Real Time is the New Paradigm

• When a rumor becomes a problem in social media it may already be too late.
• When a trend creates an opportunity, social media sources are going to be the early indicators of how to respond.
• When an online conversation becomes a meme and starts to spread it can literally explode overnight, changing your clients’ world.

Social Media monitoring ensures that your agency not only knows about these trends, it ensures that you know about them first. This offers first-mover advantage for your clients, giving you both the opportunity to mitigate risk, jump on trends, and moderate just how their brands and products are being reviewed, praised or criticized across the full spectrum of social media.

What is Social Media?

One definition is that social media consists of any medium where users can generate content on the web via online tools and networks:

• Bloggers publish anything they want: Rumors about a company’s CEO? The stock gets hit instantly.
• Homegrown video can find thousands or millions of viewers overnight: Politician caught on a phone video cam doing something unusual? It’s now part of their ‘permanent record’.
• Microbloggers literally publish their every move and experience to friends and fans: Bad service in a restaurant chain? It’s out there in minutes and spreading.
• Social networks connect thousands of friends who exhibit ‘mob’ behavior: A concert by an ostensibly unknown band sells out in minutes.

That’s the power of social media. With social media monitoring via SM2 you can offer your clients instant feedback on how they and their brands are being portrayed, distributed, reviewed and perceived by real people in real time.

Demonstrating Expertise by Example

The most powerful thing you can show a potential client is something important that they don’t already know about their brand, product, service or competition.
With traditional tracking tools like search and news alerts you’re not offering anything the client can’t find on their own. These tools are universally available at no cost. While they are powerful and essential, they typically only index every few days or even weeks and their focus is on websites rather than social media platforms. As a result, the information you find has already been noted, commented on and distributed virally in social media.
SM2 doesn’t just gather the information, it helps you analyze and respond to it.

Use Social Media Monitoring Reports in Your Pitch

Preparing for an upcoming client meeting or presentation? Sign up for an SM2 Freemium Account, at no charge, and run a search based on keywords and information relevant to your client’s business:

• Brands
• People
• Products
• Competitors
• Partners

You’ll get current results in a variety of formats and from a complete sampling of the social media universe. The charts and results track sentiment (positive/negative), geographic distribution, weighting by influence and popularity and many other attributes. Within the application you can drill down to individual sources so you can enter the conversation on behalf of your client or alert them to important new influencers. All of the data is available as charts that can be copied and pasted into your presentation format.
While the Freemium Account is limited to two primary search terms (i.e. brands or company names) and 500 search results, this is usually more than enough data to demonstrate your advanced capabilities and provides a valuable real time ’snapshot’ of how social media monitoring works.

Tips for Incorporating Social Media Reports in your Presentation

The goal here is to demonstrate your expertise and whet their appetite for more information and analysis, not to serve up a full research report. The key concepts here are information and expertise. Analyze the trends in your SM2 reports and find a couple of examples of things that your client may not have been aware of. These become a slide or two each. Draw a story or situation analysis and response for each example:

• Example One: Perceived negative environmental impact of new product introduction appearing in blog posts and wikis. Response: Correct misperception and engage influential social media commentators to mitigate damage.
• Example Two: New product embraced by unexpected market sector. Response: Repurpose marketing and messaging to take advantage of emerging opportunity.

These examples position your agency as highly in tune with emerging trends and able to rapidly respond to opportunities and crises, both highly desirable traits in an agency.

Profiting with SM2 from Techrigy

SM2 offers more than just its value as a tool for developing business. The service becomes a potential profit center for your agency as you offer the ability to monitor the growing social media ecosystem across your entire client portfolio. SM2’s paid Premium versions offer flexible pricing models so you can scale your costs as you scale up your offerings. Unlike services that require six figure annual commitments, SM2 can be purchased as a subscription based on usage or via a reasonable annual rate for more intensive usage. The service is also scalable for use in any size agency from a single practitioner to a global leader.

Tags: Business Development, Marketing, PR, SM2, Social Media // Add Comment »

Microblogging services like Twitter have exploded as individuals feel the need to tel the world their every thought and action. Now, as covered by Jeff Nolan, Twitterfone makes it super simple to Tweet by phone. This could get really out of control…

Tags: Social Media // Add Comment »