GLAM-Wiki Infographic (Photo credit: Wikipedia

Infographics are all the rage these days. Every new media company seems to have one (or more) to visually explain their offerings, and every social consultant seems to have one to share their analyses.  The damn things are all over Pinterest and there are even entire websites devoted to infographics.

Except I find most of them are pretty useless. You can’t print them out unless you have a large format printer, and the print is so tiny you can’t read them on the screen most of the time either. Which is tragic on the rare occasions that  they actually do have useful information.

In fact, I would like to know who got the brilliant idea to jam so many charts and table onto a single poster? I’ve seen more than a few infographics that DO have useful info, but  just don’t get why it has to be served up on an illegible poster.

Once in a while, I find a useful, useable one, like this illustration of the corporate ownership of major consumer brands or this one about social media strategy. Not surprisingly, the ones I like tend to be simple, and focused on conveying a single piece of information in a graphic manner.

But more often than not, they  just seem like attempts to jump on the infographic bandwagon — Look Ma! I can make an infographic!

For example, I love the Copyblogger. In fact, I recommend the site in Professional Blogging for Dummies. But the infographic he created recently to illustrate 22 Ways to Create Compelling Content When You Don’t Have a Clue wasn’t any more useful, IMNSHO, than the original post. Sure it was pretty pictures, but there wasn’t any improvement on the information.

And that is what I want from an infographic. A useful infographic materially improves upon the source data by combining multiple sources of information to create new meaning. More than just a poster with lots of “stuff,” it should transform the data into something new.

A picture is definitely worth a thousand words, but a picture made of a thousand words is not.

Related articles

• I am So Over Infographics (technologyleaders.com)
• 5 Questions to Ask before Jumping on the Infographics Bandwagon (contentmarketinginstitute.com)

This is the time of year when some folks trot out the tarot cards and crystal balls, and attempt to predict the coming year. And others wax eloquent (mostly)  on what transpired in the year just past. Over the 7 years I have been writing this blog, I have generally tried to stay away from this sort of post.

This year, however, that is pretty much what you are going to get. There are a few trends that I have been watching for a while now, always intending to post about them but never quite having  the time. Here’s the first.

Facebook  just wants “to be a real boy” and become a social content platform.

Facebook gets lots of eyeballs — 800 million active  worldwide users, 50% of whom access it everyday according to the company’s stats page. And the boys behind Facebook are smart cookies; they know they need to give people a reason to keep coming back. But, it seems like they aren’t entirely sure that catching up with friends and family and sharing “stuff”  is unique and defensible enough. And mining user data only works if you keep the users.

So they’re hitching their horses to the content wagon, and setting themselves up to be a content platform. Brand pages, apps, timelines and other enhancements designed to make Facebook a source of information, not just connection.

Brands are diving right in. Everyone has a Facebook landing page, contest or app. The ubiquitous URL in advertising has given way to the Facebook like and share buttons.

At the end of the day though, the Facebook platform is inherently hostile to robust content development. It was developed for short form messages and social connections, and layering apps and other tools to make it more content friendly doesn’t make it so.

But we’re sure as shootin’ going to try. Facebook has the eyeballs that brands want, and doesn’t want them to go elsewhere.  The more of our activities and transactions it can own, the better that database gets.  In the coming year,  more and more brands will shift content to Facebook that in the “old days”  would have been on brand-owned microsites.

The $25K question is, will they really recognize sufficient benefit from being on the Facebook platform to make up for the inherent unfriendliness of the platform to branding and deep content. Not to mention the murky area of who owns what on Facebook….

The more transactional, ephemeral and social the content, the more successful the efforts will be. Deep thinking? Complex topics? I just don’t see Facebook as a hospitable place for this. The Facebook brand page just doesn’t have enough branding to make the brands happy, or enough information to make the consumer happy. For one thing,  all the custom developed apps bypass one of the key benefits of Facebook, the simple user interface.

Brands will try, but in the end, I think the winning strategy will continue to be to link into the social graph to promote or aggregate content that lives elsewhere on microsites and blogs. This allows the brand to leverage the social aspects of Facebook, but still own their own robust content platforms.

Unfortunately, at the moment, things are moving in another direction,  and 2012 is going to be the year of bigger and splashier brand pages on Facebook.

Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.

Photo from Flickr user toffehoff. Used under a Creative Commons license.

When I wrote about who owns social media last May, I couldn’t believe THEN that we were still asking this question. I’m both surprised (and yet not) a year later that we are *still* asking. As though there were a simple, and only one, right answer, and if we ask enough, eventually we’ll get whatever answer we want to hear.

Um no. Not going to happen. Social media involves people, and people are messy. Social media engagement also depends on our expression of both our individuality and the collective mind. Try to fit that neatly in a demographic box. The mass market still exists, it is just influenced by multiple micro-markets and their denizens.

No simple answer then.

In the column I wrote last year, I concluded that the company and the consumer were the “owners” of the relationship, and ad and PR agencies were facilitators. I’d like to take this a step further and advocate for an integrated marketing approach that I think will ultimately be more successful and productive.

Don’t tell anyone, but good social media marketing is simply good marketing. Just as in the “old days,” you wouldn’t limit yourself to a single tool in the marketing toolkit – advertising, PR, direct response, loyalty programs etc., no matter how successful it was, in the “new days,” you still need to deploy multiple tools. You can’t get seduced by the flavor (or Facebook) of the month and shift all your spend because “that’s what the cool kids are doing.”  You need an integrated approach to reach your consumer, because that’s how she consumes the information she gets. It’s not a different brand before and after we buy, in an ad versus a news article versus a blog post.

People use information from different sources in different ways.  A personal referral – our old friend word-of-mouth – is treated differently than the information conveyed in an advertisement or a magazine article. But we use all the information we collect to make a purchase decision, and we generally require more than one. No matter how much Aunt Sue loves her car, we look for independent reviews and probably consult the brand website.

Our marketing message needs to appropriately be in all the important places a consumer might look for it. Do we spend more of our budget in the most productive places? Absolutely. But smart marketers don’t make the mistake of limiting the plan to a single tactic. It’s marketing suicide. Even infomercial brands like OxiClean have distribution strategies in addition to the commercials, and do not get me started on all the failed high-tech start-ups that thought they could make it on PR buzz alone.

Smart marketers also don’t let functional silos, whether internal departments, outside agencies or a combination of both,  derail the story. Especially now, when customers have such a strong voice and will more easily see if the emperor has no clothes.  It’s not enough to hand out a messaging document and timeline to the various functions and allow them to go forth in their independent silos, with their independent strategies.

This of course brings ownership of strategy back to the brand, which is where it belongs. Agencies advise, and yes, strategize. But the brand owns it.

What does that mean in practice?

Agencies that take an integrated approach to strategy, either by vertical integration or actively seeking to work with in tandem with their counterpart agencies on the brand account, are going to be more attractive to brands than those that take a more silo’d approach. We already see this happening. Some will do it well. Some not so much. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions on that score.

Social media expertise will continue to shift in-house. It has to. To navigate the organizational boundaries, foster cross-functional and inter-departmental cooperation at the level required, the person responsible for social media engagement has to have the internal knowledge and ties that only a full-time, bottom-line driven employee can. And once social media moves in-house it will have multiple flavors. The best description of what this may turn out to look like is from Jeremiah Owyang of the Altimeter Group in his piece on the two career paths of the corporate social strategist.

Warning: This integration will not be an easy road. It requires that everyone check their egos (and worries about budget) at the door. This is not easy if you run the PR agency and are worried about the ad agency getting your budget or vice versa. And within the organization, this social media “thing” is still considered a bit “squishy.” Internal champions have to navigate many hurdles, often including not having the budget for social media, just the mandate.

But I just don’t see any other way. The consumer views a product as a whole. We want a consistent experience across our interactions with the brand, whether it be functions (customer service, sales, finance) or marketing (ads, PR, coupons, sampling etc. ). And we expect to have those interactions across multiple channels – mass and micro media, new media and old.

Consumers see us as one “thing.” It’s about time we did as well.

What are you going to do to break down a silo or foster cross functional cooperation in your organization?

__

More reading:

• Which Department Owns Social Media?
• Who Owns Social Media? The best approach is to create a small team of people to provide guidance
• Who owns social media? Again.

Since I joined BlogHer earlier this Fall, I have had a lot going on — traveling, speaking, digging into the new job, moving my family to the NY area — and this poor blog has been sorely neglected. So neglected in fact that my 6th blog anniversary passed earlier this month and I didn’t even notice.

Thinking about that milestone over this holiday weekend led me to think about some of the changes I’ve observed in the blogosphere.

In 2005,  early adopters were dipping their toes into the blogging waters. The hot topic was the corporate blog, and the term “social media”  wasn’t even being used yet — Facebook was in its infancy and Twitter wouldn’t even be invented for another year. Public relations agencies were just beginning to reach out to bloggers on behalf of brands, mostly high tech and consumer electronics. Online conversation often swirled around the mistakes agencies and companies made with poorly targeted “spray and pray” outreach.

Now, according to research conducted by the Center for Marketing Research at UMass Dartmouth,  23 percent of the Fortune 500 have public blogs, including four of the top five corporations (Wal-Mart, Exxon, Chevron and General Electric), 60 percent have corporate Twitter accounts and 56 percent have Facebook pages (The Fortune 500 and Social Media: A Longitudinal Study of Blogging and Twitter Usage by America’s Largest Companies).

The study, which was announced at the Annual Research Symposium and Awards  Gala of the Society for New Communications Research, concludes:

“This [adoption of social media] clearly demonstrates the growing importance of social media in the business world. These large and leading companies drive the American economy and to a large extent the world economy. Their willingness to interact more transparently via these new technologies with their stakeholders is [a] clear. It will be interesting to watch as they expand their adoption of social media tools and connect with their constituents in dramatically new ways.”

Furthermore, according to research conducted by FedEx and Ketchum, and reported in eMarketer, 75 percent of companies worldwide participate in social media in some aspects of their communications and marketing strategy, with 10% actively leading in the space and 15% still mostly on the sidelines observing (Leveraging Best Practices for Social Media).

Another hot topic in the early days of this blog was whether the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) would accept blogs as an outlet for material disclosure by public companies.  The SEC began studying the issue in late 2006 and in 2008, announced that it would accept websites and blogs as outlets for material disclosure under certain circumstances.

The topic that has engaged me the most since I dove into the social media pool, however, is the relationship between brands and consumers. Initially, this activity was called blogger relations, a name that reflected its roots in public relations and a focus on blogs. Over the past year or two, the term blogger outreach became more prominent — in part I think in an effort to distance the work from public relations. At least that was my reason for the vocabulary shift.

The sphere of activity also has extended beyond blogs to embrace social networks like Facebook and microblogs like Twitter and Tumblr, and influence is just as important as blog real estate, prompting a shift to talk about  “social media influencers” rather than just bloggers.

Going into the new year, I will be shifting my analysis of this topic to focus on influencer engagement. How well do we engage influencers across the range of social media channels? What can brands do to better engage the customer with the brand premise while retaining authenticity? What is the role of the influencer herself? What can she do to engage proactively with the brands she loves without “selling out?”

Bottom line, I am more interested in the two-way sustainable engagement, brand to influencer and influencer to brand, than I am in a one-way outreach or a single campaign.

Next week, I’ll kick this off with a brief summary of  some best practices for influencer engagement.

This past Thursday, I delivered my  workshop on using social media and blogs to build your brand and professional profile at the Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference For Women. I was honored — pleased — amazed — gratified — excited by the reception given to the workshop, both at the event and afterward.

Quite simply, it reminded me why I love what I do for a living.

The 500 or so  women in the audience were very engaged.  I had about 6 or 8 questions at the end, and I’m sure there would have been more had I not gotten “the hook” from my timekeeper, because  I was mobbed at the podium at the end. The best part was afterward, though, when folks stopped me in the exhibit hall or came to my book signing to talk more about the topic or get my advice on a more personal level.

And my book! I don’t know how many copies of Professional Blogging For Dummies the conference bookstore had on hand, but I do know that the Pennsylvania ladies wiped it out. My book was sold out by 2pm.

What do I do for a living?  I help:

• connect brands and bloggers in win-win relationships
• companies integrate social media into their marketing and customer service strategy
• people find their social media and blogging sweet spot through my book and workshops

But really, what I do is help people and brands tell their stories. And so many of the women at the conference had wonderful stories to tell. I truly hope they start blogs because I want to  hear from and about them.

That’s why the very best thing was the thank-you note I got on Facebook today from someone who attended my session and bought the book. She wrote that I inspired her to get moving on her business and a blog.

That makes all the difference.

Because I know that I made a difference.

I love what I do.

–

If you are in Houston or Boston, don’t miss the upcoming conferences in these states. I’ll be doing the social media workshop at both, and look forward to meeting you there. In fact, I am giving away a pass to each. All you have to do is leave a comment on my September 25th post for your chance to win.

Good friend Morra Aarons-Mele’s company Women Online is a sponsor of the conferences, in good company with firms like Citizens Bank and State Farm Insurance.

Last week I attended the AARP Orlando@50+ Conference. Snide remarks from friends on Facebook aside, I was not in Orlando as an attendee to plan my post-retirement life, although had I been, there was plenty of information on the show floor and in the sessions to help me. I’m still a couple years shy of the calendar milestone, and as for retirement, that’s at least 20 years off.

I was at the conference to present two workshops on Connecting and Communicating with Social Media as part of Kaplan University’s educational track within the conference. The room was full both times – about 280 capacity – even though the room was as far from the front door as you could possibly get and on Saturday it was one of the last sessions, competing with all the entertainment Orlando offers.

It’s impossible to introduce folks to “everything” social media has to offer in an hour session, so I focus largely on blogs and Facebook. Even then, people – especially in beginner audiences – tend to have very specific “how do I do this…” questions, and there is no way to get to all of them. That’s why I am particularly glad that as part of its deliverables for the AARP attendees, Kaplan has created reinventyourself.kaplan.edu, a site dedicated to expanding on the topics presented at the conference with self-paced in-depth courses on each topic. The site launches October 7. I’ll add a link here once it is live.

I helped develop a course based on my workshop, and got a sneak peek Saturday. The online course developers did a great job translating my concepts to the online interactive format. It is a great start for anyone dipping their toe into social media for the first time, at any age. It’s also free!

Of course, if you want to delve more deeply into blogging, and especially making money on your blog, my book Professional Blogging For Dummies is also a good choice! Links in the sidebar to your online bookseller of choice.

The workshops I am doing for the Conferences for Women in Pittsburgh, Houston and Boston use a similar outline, with a slight shift on focus to women and how these tools can help them personally and professionally. I’m giving away tickets to Houston and Boston; all you have to do is leave a comment on my post Using Social Media to Build Your Brand for a chance to win.

For more on technology use by older Americans, check out this post on the AARP blog ShAARP. I was honored that they included the story about my mom that I use in my workshops to make two important points about technology and the Internet. First, there is no age requirement or limit. Second,  don’t think – or let anyone tell you, that you can’t do something. We learn how to do the things that let us accomplish our goals. Even if it seems – or even is – hard.

I’m really looking forward to speaking at the upcoming Pennsylvania Governor’s Conference for Women (10/14), the Texas Conference for Women (11/10) and the Massachusetts Conference for Women (12/9).

At each conference, I’ll be teaching a workshop on Using Social Media to Build Your Brand. Here’s the abstract:

In this tough economy, it’s more important than ever to develop a brand and set yourself apart from the rest of the masses. Whether you have a job and are looking to advance, in the midst of a job search or working to build a business, social media provides the skills, network and energy to create a serious career advantage. This interactive workshop will explore ways to master social media to help create and reinvent your brand, reputation and thought leadership. Attendees will learn how to utilize social media to:

• Establish access to new networks
• Leverage Facebook and Twitter as a practical professional tool
• Create a blog to align with and help you achieve your short-and-long-term professional goals
• Break into new industries, professions and business opportunities

I’ll be arriving in each town the day before the conference and generally taking off sometime in the late afternoon of the conference, but would love to connect with as many folks as I can while I am in town. If you are planning to attend one of the conferences, or just live locally, please email or dm me and let’s see if we can’t get a meet-up/tweet-up going the night before the conference.

The exception to this is Boston. While I hope to have a home base in Connecticut by then, we’ll still be living in Mass. as well. The plan is to see the calendar year out here, and then transfer my son to his new school after the December break. So I won’t be scramming after the Boston conference with quite the same speed!

I’ve already given away my pass to the Pennsylvania Conference,  but I have a pass to give away to each of the other two conferences as well. All you have to do is leave a comment on this post. Be sure to let me know which conference you’d like to attend, Texas or Mass. I’ll use a random number generator to pick the winning comments. The first comment number generated will get the pass for her conference of choice, and then I will generate numbers until I get a comment for the other conference. Please post your comment by midnight EST Sunday October 17, 2010. I’ll pick the winners early the following week.

Also, if you have a copy of Professional Blogging For Dummies and you’d like me to sign it, please feel free to bring it with you. I always have time for that!

Update 8 October: I will be doing book signings at the Conferences for Women bookstore so if you don’t have a copy yet, you will be able to buy one there.

Liz Gumbinner (Mom 101) wrote a tremendous post this morning about the importance of properly compensating bloggers for their work: Nothing in life is free. Except, it seems, a mommyblogger. If you haven’t read her post and are in any way shape or form involved in blogger relations, social media marketing or online advertising, go read it now.

If you are coming over here from her post (as she was kind enough to link to me), here are a few links to posts that I’ve written on the topic. I thought that might make a wee bit more sense than my movie trailer madness post about the A-team movie Although come to think of it, maybe we should get the A-team on this problem….

• The blogger relations category
• The secret sauce for the perfect pitch
• Blogger outreach, shared values and cotton swabs?

cross posted to Snapshot Chronicles

The Super Bowl is pretty much the only athletic contest in the world where the television advertisements during the event get nearly as much media coverage as the event itself. Likewise the run-up and hype of the commercials. Will the network will sell all the space? Who will run ads, how much will they pay and what will they promote?

Before the ads even run, the pundits are postulating and after, they dissect them.

It’s a bit obscene really — and full disclosure, I’ve played the game on my blog in past years.

This year, though, the real news is who is NOT advertising during the Super Bowl. Instead of spending a hefty chunk of change on a few spots during the football game, Pepsi launched the Pepsi Refresh Project. For the next year,  the company is giving away $1.3 million dollars per month to community development projects submitted and selected online by the public.

Anyone can submit a grant. Pepsi will accept 1000 every month, and the public can vote for up to 10 projects every day.

Of course, the company is getting a lot of media, and social media, coverage for the campaign, and I imagine they are also spending a pretty penny on the infrastructure to support the project with their ad, PR and interactive agencies. I’m sure they have high expectations for positive revenue as well as brand awareness results from the project.

What makes this campaign so exciting is the scale of the grants. Other companies have done similar projects to fund charities through community submission and vote. For example American Express. But I can’t think of anything from corporate America that matches the scale of Pepsi Refresh.

It is truly refreshing to see a company do so much potential good. I’ve got no problem if they “do good” as a result.

In fact, I’d love to see more copycats.

Who’s next?

Advertising.

It is often said that consumers don’t like or pay attention to advertising.

Not true.

What consumers don’t like is BAD advertising. Lazy copy. Poor targeting. Offensive stereotypes.

We also don’t like crummy products. No matter how good the ad, it cannot make a crummy product excellent or a dangerous product safe. Regardless of what they say on Mad Men.

We do like — even love — good advertising. Ads that tell a story. Make us feel. Make us laugh. If we’re in marketing, make us wish we’d thought of that.

Tuesday night, I was privileged to  attend the 49th Annual Hatch Awards as a guest of the AdClub and got to see a lot of great advertising without having to watch TV or read a magazine.

There’s no way I can do justice to all the award winners in a single post, but here’s a random sampling of the ones I liked most.

My favorite TV spots were Mullen‘s Bruins Hockey Rules commercials. The campaign won a gold as did this commercial “Date.”

If you want more, I posted all the spots over at Snapshot Chronicles.

I also liked Arnold‘s TV spots for the American Legacy Foundation and Hill Holliday‘s series for Liberty Mutual’s Responsibility Project.

It’s harder to appreciate print advertising in the award show format. You miss the look and feel of the ad in the chosen vehicle. How well it fits (or doesn’t) in the publication. Even so, it was easy to like Mullen’s work for the New England Aquarium and Kelliher Samets Volk/Boston’s newspaper ads for WMBR radio.

Finally, as much as I do not believe in personal branding, I have to commend the silver winner in the personal branding category for the sheer balls of his campaign, malecopywriter.com

You may have noticed I did not mention any of the award winners in the social media or website/microsite categories. Not because the work wasn’t excellent. It was. But my strongest impression was that advertising agencies see, and execute, social media very differently than PR agencies and marketing shops (internal and external) focused on interactive media. Yes, I am about to make a generalization, and welcome respectful disagreement, but the ad agency work seemed to be about production values, not relationships.

In other words, engagement means very different things to the different groups.

Now, I didn’t actually find this surprising. I’ve written before that I have noticed that PR and advertising folks definitely approach engagement through different lenses.

Public relations folks — good PR folks — understand the importance of building relationships with customers. That blogger engagement is a commitment, not a one-night stand. Where sometimes they have difficulty is engaging with emotion and enthusiasm. Their training teaches them to be objective, factual. Storytellers, not promoters. It can be difficult (although not impossible) to shed that skin and engage around emotion and shared values, versus news, facts and benefits.

Advertising professionals, on the other hand, have no problem understanding the importance of emotion in eliciting engagement. Good advertising taps into our emotions to evoke an action. It’s rarely about what a product does. It’s all about how it makes us feel. Where advertising pros can miss in social media is that they don’t dial it down to more personal terms. The message is hype, not human. It’s about producing a slick “viral video,” not about finding a shared value with the customer that encourages her to pass the message on.

That’s where marketing generalists (like me) can help the process. We embrace both approaches – relationship and emotion – and can help organizations best leverage their advertising and PR specialists to develop well-rounded programs and campaigns that truly engage the customer.