Altyrian View

According to IDG News service and as posted on MacWorld, Google will today announce OpenSocial, its foray into the social media space where MySpace and Facebook are among the competition.

Google will take a page from the Facebook strategy by opening up APIs (application programming interfaces). For those of us who aren’t programers, this is a big deal because it allows applications and Web sites to interact directly with OpenSocial. As a matter of fact, many think that’s why Facebook has become so popular.

With its ownership of YouTube, Google already has access to millions who use social media sites. If done well, OpenSocial could be big…

Think Flickr meets Twitter. It’s the site that asks “What are you doing … with that picture you just took on your iPhone.” It’s like a visual “diary” from iPhoners around the world. It’s iPhone Shots.

I accidentally found this site before it launch and was the first to publicly register a couple of days ago. You’ll find some really cool pictures, some really fun pictures and some pictures that I’m not sure about. I thought that it was a great way to create a group around the iPhone. Check it out. I’ve posted a couple of pictures there, but this one is my favorite.

I just joined MyRagan.com. In case you haven’t heard of it, please are calling it “MySpace for Communicators.” It’s a pretty neat idea. You are able to create and join groups around common communications interests such as non-profit, healthcare, social media, etc. Although I just registered last night, I found the system very easy to use, and it looks like it could be a great resource for communicators.

Right now, IABC and PRSA must be kicking themselves. What a great way to add value to membership and attract new members. Oh well.

If you want to be my friend, my username is johnmims.

eMarketer has released some really interesting data about advertising through social media Web sites and podcasts. No real surprise, both categories of spending are on the rise. For online social networks, ad spending was $350 million last year, is expected to be $865 million this year and up to $2,150 million by 2010.

The upward trend in podcast advertising isn’t much different. According to a report on eMarketer.com 2006 was $80 million, 2008 is expected to be $240 million and 2011 is expected to be $400 million.

Every semester I visit Elon University to talk to students about social media. When I first visited two years ago, I was surprised at how few students read blogs and listened to podcasts. When I visited last week, i was equally surprised at the complete turnaround – nearly all of the students were reading blogs and / or listening to podcasts. The media around online social networks is definitely growing. It’s certainly a good opportunity to reach a wider audience in conjunction with traditional advertising.

Of course, if you would like to sponsor our podcast…

Back in the day (about 8 years ago), I carved out a great little niche in my area creating Web sites. I’m not a techie (well, not a professional one anyway), and I’m not a particularly good designer. I am, however, a good marketer and communicator. In the early days of Web development, Web site projects were generally handled by the IT department. It’s almost laughable today, but the marketing / PR departments were generally not at all involved in a company’s first Web site. Fortunately, companies in this market recognized that they needed marketing’s help in the development of the Web site. Yes, Web sites began to become marketing tools.

Fast forward a few years. Today I read a report that Web sites are declining in Web development standards. In other words, Web sites are becoming less effective as marketing tools. Not because people are using them differently; it’s because the sites themselves have become less consumer centric.

Here’s the reason: communicators (marketing / PR / advertisers / etc) are not keeping up with the technology. Brochureware Web sites (Web sites that are nothing more than an online brochure) are a thing of the past. Every company that has a sales component, needs e-commerce on their Web site. Every company that offers a service, wants to provide direct interaction with their clients – often through some social media component. Now, more than ever, it takes a complete fusion of design, technology and marketing to build a Web site. Because of the early days of Web development, companies are quick to let IT take the wheel again, and communicators don’t know enough to stay at the table. Web sites are being built around the technology and not around their marketing purpose. Unfortunately, many communicators don’t understand the technology or the concepts their customers are demanding be incorporated in their Web sites.

If you’re reading this blog, you are probably a step up on the majority of your communications colleagues. Next time you are at a PRSA or IABC meeting, bring up social media. Sadly, you’ll get some blank stares and lots of “you are such techie.” As an industry, we don’t get it yet. Until we do, expect Web sites to get worse before they get better.

Bulldog Reporter has an article this morning saying that Facebook and MySpace have declining memberships according to an article on The Wall Street Journal Online (subscription required). The reason – spam and illicit requests. This from the Bulldog report:

Also, it’s been seen that advertisers are taking advantage of the capabilities of both sites, and sending out mass emails and friend requests, overloading the inboxes of countless users to make their products known. This type of guerrilla marketing has been seen by many as junk mail, and has done the opposite of illicit interest in brands by turning off users to both sites.

Advertisers? Guerrilla marketing? So, I’m guessing that the joker that tries to post a comment to this blog completely off topic with a link to an enlargement product is now an “advertiser” using “guerrilla marketing.” Common Bulldog! The decline in memberships is not because of the Burger King 24 MySpace page – it’s the spammers that want us to join their group to check out their Web cam. It’s from the online “pharmacies” that have tons of Viagra. There is still good opportunities for real marketers and advertisers to use this social media space for legitimate and (most importantly) wanted advertising.

The power of social media is that it can be a great form of pull marketing instead of the traditional push marketing. Unfortunately, there are those in cyberspace who have rotten products that want to push them on us. This isn’t just a problem for MySpace and Facebook – it’s a problem on blogs, forums, SecondLife and anywhere else we can interact with one another. Although I agree that some of the decline in memberships is because of spam, I think that part of the decline is that for some, the novelty has gone away.

Kami Huyse, APR, has announced that there will be a meeting of public relations professionals in Second Life tomorrow, September 14 at 4 p.m. EST. I’m really excited that there is a communicator’s group that meets in the afternoon, and it should be fun to meet other PR people from around the country while sitting at my desk. Here are the details:

What: Second Life Second Thursday Worldwide
Where: Comms Café in Second Life
You can find the café by logging on to the Second Life client, hitting the search button, entering “Comms Café” and then teleporting there.
When: Thursday September 14, 2006 (Friday in Australia and India)
Time: 3 p.m. Central Time U.S., and 20:00 GMT

Look for me tomorrow. I’m JohnT Randall in SL.

Our good friend Fard Johnmar (interviewed in Altyrian View Podcast #11) has sent me an email about an ebook that he’s just published. I just got the email this morning so I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but I’m sure that it’ll be a good read for healthcare PR professionals.

Once you’ve read it, stop by and let everyone know what you think….

According to an article in the New York Times as posted on this blog, only two CEOs from Fortune 500 companies blogs – only one of those blogs on a regular basis. So, is CEO blogging at these huge companies ever going to happen?

I asked my good friend, Jesse Moore, who is a retired marketing / PR guru, what he thought. Jesse’s not a big fan of the blog. He said “the more effective CEO is going to be the one that’s walking around and not sitting in front of his damn computer blogging.” As much as I hate to admit it, he’s right. Although he’s right, I think that we are going to see more and more CEOs blog on a regular basis.

The job of the CEO is as much communicator as anything else. (more…)

Is podcasting a viable marketing tool? The answer might seem obvious you and me, but many companies just don’t see it. Even when it fits perfectly in their marketing strategy, lots of companies are unwilling to move into podcasting. John Havens has written a great post on Adotas about this, and he gives some good reasons to podcast that every corporate marketer should be aware of. 

In addition to his reasons though, I would like to add this: podcasting provides a powerful, simple and cost-effective way to pull customers to our message.

Here’s why this is so important. We all know that marketing is changing, and it will change even more as technology moves forward. It’s becoming more and more difficult to push our message to customers because our customers are filtering out more and more of what comes at them. So, instead we need to get our customer to come to us - in effect, we have to pull them to our marketing message. (John Hagal gave a great presentation on this at the 2006 Innovative Marketing Conference - you can hear it on the For Immediate Release site).

So how do we pull customers to our message? By giving them interesting and relevant content - content that they want to receive, that they will actually seek out and spend time with. Of course, this content can be created and made available in different ways - print, radio, TV, Internet, you name it. But one of the least expensive and most effective ways happens to be… (drum roll here)… podcasting. Eventually, even the most unwilling companies will come to understand this. The trick is to help them grasp it sooner rather than later.