February 8, 2010
For Tod Maffin tod@todmaffin.com
(604) 618-2861
Start 00:17
End 22:38
Total: 22:00
FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS: A SOCIAL MEDIA
MARKETING HANDBOOK
Tod Maffin:
The Tech Report is heard weekly on the MediaOnTap Radio Network.
Always happy to get your feedback. Just email me Tod@todmaffin.com
So that’s one side of the equation, becoming a trusted agent of your
community of – well, let’s face it – consumer targets. Feels so dirty
combining the two.
Well, speaking of dirty, the co-authors of the book “Friends with Benefits”
[laugh] are getting a lot of attention on the internet, and not for what you
might think. Darren Barefoot, and Julie Szabo live and work in Vancouver,
which is where I’ve reached them now. Hi you two.
Darren Barefoot: Hi there.
Julie Szabo:
Hi Tod.
TM:
‘Friends with Benefits’ still goes to casual relationships on Wikipedia. I would
have thought with your expertise in search engine optimization …
JS:
[laugh] I don’t think we’re quite that good.
TM:
You know you’ve hit the big time when you bump casual relationships out of
Google.
JS:
Off the internet. Yeah.
TM:
Off the internet entirely. That’s right.
Well, like Julien’s book, yours begins with a story. But rather than a crime
story like his, it’s one I’m more familiar with personally. The old days of
BBS’s, these bulletin board systems that were phone lines directly connecting
one computer to another. It was great fun at least when you’re 15 years old.
Kind of like a solitary nerd using the digital channels.
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 2 of 9
But they say one IS the loneliest number. Is it?
DB:
Not so much. That’s one of the common misconceptions I think about early
BBS nerds and early online forums, and that sort of thing, is that there’s a
truth that sold the internet, that people really liked to meet in real [01:50
inaudible] under their – you can go on YouTube and watch these incredibly
nerdy parties from The Well, which was one of the first big bulletin board
systems in the States. And it was all these guys there, and a few women, all
meeting together – like I say in real [02:04 inaudible]. The lesson there is that
the web’s always been social, right from the early, early days.
TM:
Sort of the foundation of your book you lay out the five fundamentals of
social media, that being democracy, community, collaboration, scope, and
authenticity. And I want to walk you through each of those just so we get a
sense of what those are, specifically for companies. I’m thinking small to
medium size companies, like under 300 employees or so.
So with an eye to that kind of an audience, tell me about how the first one
there – we’ll step through them – democracy in social media? That doesn’t
even make sense. If I’m a company and I have a corporate message.
Democracy? I don’t want people messing with my brand, do I? Don’t I just
want to send them a message and be done with it?
JS:
You know we talk to a lot of companies where there’s somebody who’s job
description is Brand Manager, and we like to joke and say that the best you
can do these days is a Brand Mitigator as opposed to a Brand Manager.
The reason we talk about democracy is because I think large companies and
smalls companies alike both think about marketing in terms of this very topdown approach. I come from a more traditional PR background and that was
very much the approach to promotion in the past. Because you would go with
your marketing message to journalist an analysts, the people who had the
power at the time, and you would try to sell your message to them and
hopefully they would in turn take that message to the masses.
But of course now, with blogs and podcasts and online social networks, that
just doesn’t work in the same way. There’s still that component to marketing
and we have to be prepared for your message to get into the hands of the
masses and for all kinds of wild and potentially wonderful things to happen to
it along the way.
TM:
Certainly there are those channels, social media, Facebook, I mean, you name
it. There’s thousands of them. But does that necessarily mean that the
mainstream media, the people you used to pitch to, are less important these
days?
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 3 of 9
JS:
I don’t think that they’re less important. I think one of the challenges is that
for PR people or for marketing people inside organizations, is that there’s
fewer of them. There are fewer newspapers. There’s fewer offline traditional
journals. There’s fewer radio stations. So, when you are looking at ways to get
your message out, that’s of course an important aspect, but as those
opportunities dwindle, you have to be prepared to take your head out of the
sand and say, “Okay, what else is going on that is important and that we
should tap into that may not be those traditional channels”.
TM:
And very different ways of pitching influential blogger than the mainstream
media, isn’t it?
DB:
Pitching bloggers or other online influences, you tend to be much more
conversational, much more casual. You can, for example, there are different
rules around incentives if you like if we could offer them, than traditional
journalists.
But fundamentally, it’s about building relationships, and so the core aspects of
it, or core strategy if you like, is the same. It’s just some of the tactics are
different.
TM:
Sometimes when I’ve pitched stories to bloggers for my own clients and my
own work, I almost always get a reply (which is great). But it’s either
extremely positive or it’s extremely negative, telling me that I’m an idiot, and
how dare I do this. But it’s still better than what you get from the mainstream
media, and being part of that as well I will confess that most of the time
emails that come in, pitches just get completely ignored.
DB:
Yeah, I think for most bloggers, not the top-tier ones, but most bloggers,
getting pitched is still a new and unusual experience. Some may have different
responses to it than the standard journalist’s apathy. So that’s the kind of
territory you need to negotiate as well.
TM:
I’m always interested to see how fast these ‘old school’ services keep up in
the PR world. There’s a company out there calls Cision, which is actually a
collection of – I want to say Bowden’s I think used to be – but Cision’s got a
very interesting media database, just like all the companies do, Canada
Newswire and all those. But this one includes bloggers, and it has a way of
rating whether they’re leaning toward liking your company or leaning toward
not liking your company. That doesn’t exist in the database to begin with. You
basically can say “okay I want all education bloggers in Canada” and [sound
effect] it spits out a list. As you work with them you can tag them as saying
“You know what? This guy – not so good”.
DB:
We kind of do that in an ad hoc fashion to be honest. But again, for us it is
more about building relationships with people over time so we can back to
stories from different clients or from different industries, depending on what
they cover, was there certain deepness.
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 4 of 9
TM:
It all comes down to relationships, as you mentioned, but that a lot of time it
takes to commit to that, and a lot of newswires and companies don’t really
have the time to put into that. Should they hire a whole bunch of people to do
that, or should they just not stick their head out of the sand. Boy, that’s a
horrible metaphor.
JS:
[laugh] You know, I think in my experience in traditional media, unless
you’re company or non-profit, or an organization of some kind, that has some
really compelling hard news, sending out a press release through the wire
service is not that successful anyway. So I think that replicating that to
bloggers is probably not going to give you the results that maybe you’re
hoping for.
Whereas in traditional PR and again in new media and blogger outreach, what
we find most successful again and again is instead of trying to hit every single
blogger that covers education, hand pick the ones that you feel are most likely
to a) be sympathetic to your cause; and also are open to being pitched and
cultivate those relationships. And we just find that despite that taking some
time, the outcome and the success metrics are much higher than just
spamming a bunch of people with a press release.
TM:
So that’s the first fundamental of social media in your book called “Friends
with Benefits”. That was democracy.
Let’s talk about the second one, community, and back in the day when web
1.0 was around, the way you did community online was you stuck up a forum
and invited people to start discussions in there. Tell me it’s gotten better.
DB:
[laugh] Well, it’s at least gotten much more attributive or the mistakes
companies make all the time, do just that, or some variation of the that, “Hey,
let’s build our own social network. We’re Heinz and we’re going to make a
Heinz social network and people will flock to it. If we build it, they’ll come”.
That never happens.
So a community is much more distributed on the web now, right? There may
be forums on the – if I continue to use Heinz – on the Heinz site. There may
be third party forums that real condiments [09:01 inaudible] have started on
their own. There may be ketchup blogs where people sample and rate different
kinds of ketchups. There may be a Facebook group that people who like
ketchup, who hate ketchup, Heinz employees, or former employees have all
started. Myspace, YouTube videos, Flickr posts, yadda, yadda, yadda. Those
are all areas of community. So, were it used to one spot, you had drag
everybody to that spot. Now we use a word from Seth Godin – tribe – your
tribe of people you want to reach is now probably distributed in a bunch of
different places.
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 5 of 9
TM:
The different places that you mention are Facebook, is one area of course, that
has a lot of communities, and you can start your own in there by creating a fan
page, which is free. There’s also Ning, which is like a ‘roll you own
Facebook’ in a way. You can create your own social network that’s not tied to
Facebook’s, or you can even build your own. There are some enormous
projects out there, mostly by Fortune 500 companies, that have very big
community sites. How do you know which one’s right for you?
JS:
In writing the book we did a lot of research and we found lots of different case
studies, and one that comes to mind is call “Bud TV”. It was a Budweiser
project. They have a lot of money and they have obviously a lot of customers.
So what they tried to do is they tried to create Bud TV, which was commercial
content, but some of it was also content for comedy, perhaps from The
Comedy Network and sports content, and it actually didn’t work for them at
all. You would be surprised that an organization with that many customers
and that high profile and that much money throw at, wouldn’t be able to
succeed. But I think that unless you have a very community-driven product or
project, starting your own large social network is almost always a bad idea.
DB:
Even the going Ning routes. Ninety-nine percent of the time trying to start
your own social network is the wrong solution. You know there are 350
million people in Facebook, right? Some of them love Budweiser. When
people are on Facebook they tend to want to stay on Facebook and they’re in a
community or social frame of mind, right? So it’s that much easier to launch a
Fan Page and customize it, because there’s a lot you can do in terms of
customization inside Facebook to bring those people a short distance from
their own profiles or their friend’s profiles in Facebook to this other part of
Facebook, as opposed to dragging them across the internet to something called
Bud.tv, which presents them with all these barriers to entry.
TM:
The third fundamental is collaboration. That’s really kind of the key. There
used to be this thing, again back in the 1.0 days, where it was the three C’s. It
was content, community and commerce, building it all together. Collaboration
though is squeezing in on the web 2.0 days. What is that?
DB:
There can be huge collaboration projects on the web, like Wikipedia we talked
about, is the biggest collaboration in human history, would be my guess.
Something like 8 million contributors, 250,000 core contributors, over a
million articles in English. The stats are amazing and they go on and on and
on.
Really the story of collaboration is the story of cheap or free tools, and
ubiquitous broadband internet access, where two artists, two musicians across
the country from each other can construct a musical track by themselves.
Photographers from around the world can work together, or videographers can
work together remotely. That’s because the ‘tools’, the hardware tools like
cameras or audio equipment, and the software tools in the form of desktop
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 6 of 9
apps or websites or whatever, are cheap or free, and you get everyone on
planet.
For a small amount of money you can internet access, so this enables
collaborations of all sorts, and to be honest that’s the principle that probably
has the least to do with companies because getting your customers or your
partners or your tribe to collaborate on things is incredibly high order task. It’s
high demand. It’s high friction and it’s high threshold. So as [12:59 inaudible]
you’d have a hyper-engaged community or a group of engaged fans or
customers to make any real collaboration work. We’ve seen companies try to
start wikis, for example, public wikis where people add their own tricks and
tips, or notes, and adoption is very, very slow.
TM:
And yet a few become breakout hits. I’m thinking of a scant few, as you
mentioned. I’m thinking of one in particular. I can’t remember the URL for
the life of me, but it’s a wiki site that lists where power outlets in airports are.
You just look up the page and you say “okay, well I’m in Frankfurt and I’m in
the B terminal and I’m at Gate 24, where can I get power?” That’s an example
of one great little idea and sprung. It became very popular.
What are the elements of what THAT site is doing that presumably is working
well versus all of the others that have not worked well from a marketing point
of view?
JS:
When companies want to collaborate with their customers, they still do too
much taking and not enough giving. What we see often is a company saying
“Give us your feedback” or “Tell us the new features you want us to use”.
And that still feels a lot like a one-way street. In the example that you just
gave, which sounds like a great website and one that I would like the URL for.
Obviously that is focused on providing useful information for people that need
it. Companies that can come up with equal measure of giving and taking in the
collaborative process will be more successful.
DB:
Clay Shirky calls that ‘The Bargain’ right? What’s the bargain for the
contributors or the collaborators, right? The bargain is obvious in this case –
Oh I get to contribute to the valuable resource that I can make use of. Another
aspect of perhaps [14:41 inaudible] of this website is that it obviously appears
to nerds. It appeals to geeks, people who spend a lot of time on the web and
would naturally be inclined to need power outlet, to be able to detect them,
and have the skills to edit the wiki page for example, which not everybody
feels confident doing.
TM:
Wikis are still hard to edit you know. They’re not hard if you’re a nerd, but I
mean gosh, there’s like left-bracket left-bracket left-bracket means something
for goodness sake, and weird things like that.
DB:
Yeah, Wikipedia is frustratingly hard to edit. There’s an interesting project in
making a simple editor that produces good results in Wikipedia.
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
TM:
Page 7 of 9
[laugh] Can you go too far in collaborating with your audience? I’m thinking
of Doritos campaign recently where they came out with this flavour that they
didn’t name and they just put a big dollar sign on the front of the bag. It was a
white bag. It was called the white bag campaign and it was just blank except
for this big dollar sign, and the idea was that they’re turning over the entire
brand of that particular flavour, the entire look-and-feel, someone got to say
what the flavour was. They got to name it. They got to design the cover, and
all they had to do was put in an ad, and make basically like a 30 second video
ad. And that person won not only a whole bunch of money, but one percent of
sales of those potato chips for eternity. Which I’m clearly in the wrong
business.
You mentioned early Brand Mitigators instead of Brand Managers, but can
you go too far with the brand?
DB:
There’s another funny example. I forget where this aquarium was but it was
aquarium they had a new baby whale -- I guess the whale gave birth or
something -- and they had a contest to vote what the whale’s name would be.
And some communities online thought it would be fun to hijack the contest,
and so the whale’s name turned out to be Mr. Splashy Pants, which is perhaps
not the most noble name for a beast of the beach.
Yeah, that’s always a risk. It’s one of the risks of this kind of social media
engagement is that things can go pear-shaped. They can go unpredictable, but
this is the nature of marketing, and the nature of marketing on the web and has
been for a decade.
JS:
I think sometimes marketing organizations don’t actually spend enough time
on line to see the case studies or read about the marketing initiatives that go
poorly, and so they’re really surprised by negative outcome. One of the
examples that comes to my mind too is Darren 17:06 ??Rightbetter’s Chrysler
that did the [DB: Ah, it was a GM truck]. That did a campaign where basically
it provided some photos or video or content on the web and then you could
make your own ad. [DB: It was for an SUV]. And it for an SUV and a lot of
people who made their own ads, made ads that were highly negative about
SUVs and the environment, as one might expect could happen.
So I think when you’re planning your marketing initiatives and you’re
thinking of doing something, a collaboration with either your customers or
with potential customers or random people on the web, it’s really important to
do some research and see what other people have experienced, and maybe that
would change the way you frame your contest.
DB:
And you want to think about all the possibilities. What if we get no entries?
What if we get 10,000 entries? What if the entries all turn out to be negative?
What if someone uploads rude photos or rude video? You want to consider all
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 8 of 9
those permutations because the process is way more open and way more
collaborative than it was in an offline space.
TM:
I have found the URL to the AirPower Wiki. I will give it away at the end of
this interview.
JS:
Well we’ll stick around then.
TM:
We kind of have to. There’s a similar Mr. Splashy Pants episode that
happened in Vancouver a number of years ago in a community south of
Vancouver called Richmond, and they have a number of roads. Their main
roads are numbered like No. 1 Road, No. 2 Road, No. 3 Road, and so forth.
It’s not very creative, but there you go. They had this bridge that was
connecting Richmond to Vancouver Airport. The airport itself is actually on
an island. So they have this bridge connecting No. 2 Road to the airport. So
they had this big contest and lots of submissions. What should we name the
bridge that goes between the airport and No. 2 Road? And after thousands of
submissions, you know what they picked? The No. 2 Road Bridge.
DB:
[laugh] Terrific.
TM:
Three cheers for creativity in government.
Alright, we’ve just got a couple of minutes left. I want to cover off the last
two fundamentals of social media, scope and authenticity.
DB:
Scope’s an easy one. We no longer have the 42 minutes hour of television. We
no longer have – movies are no longer required to be 97 minutes. Novels
don’t have to be 50,000 words. Yadda yadda yadda. The web has broken all of
our assumptions about scope. There’s one contest website where the project
was “Let’s make 10,000 drawings of a sheep”. That would be kind of difficult
thing to manage in the offline world than the online world. It conjures all sorts
of possibilities. This is why we can have 130 million blogs, or we can have a
billion YouTube videos, two billion photos on Flickr and we spend a lot of
time, and are going to spend a lot of time in the future, designing technologies
to filter, personalize, manage this huge, huge firehose of information with just
endless scope.
TM:
And authenticity?
JS:
Authenticity and transparency are words that the audience has heard before,
because when we talk about social media, we talk about marketing on the
web. Those are two ideas that come up immediately, and the reason for that is
incredibly difficult to lie on the internet and not get found out. As a marketing
person you might think “Well, I don’t lie. That’s not what I do in my everyday
work” but on the web you have to be incredibly sensitive about even how
you’re representing yourself and your company and your products, and telling
truth, being authentic, being completely transparent about the work that you
Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook
Page 9 of 9
do on the web, is key to building a good reputation online and also being
trusted by both your customers and maybe potential customers who are
wanting to engage with you on the web.
So if you do things that harm your reputation or make you not a trustworthy
sort, then web marketing is not going to be successful for you. The example
that comes to mind is from a couple of years ago I think, but a company called
Belkin that makes routers and other hardware devices. They actually got
caught having hired some people to go onto Amazon and a number of other
websites to write 5/5 reviews for their products. And so of course there was a
ton of negative PR around them saying “don’t believe the 5/5 reviews for
Belkin Products because it’s a sham”. So now, even though in the past, and
I’m sure they’re not doing that, people today who Google Belkin and review
are probably going to come across the articles or the blog posts about all the
lying Belkin did on the web, instead of actually coming across a review that’s
going to help them decide whether or not they want to purchase that product.
TM:
I think a lot of that’s happening in the Apple Apps Store for applications
because I’ve read a number of game reviews and some of them are clearly five
star and just glowing. I mean they’re dripping with maple syrup they’re so
sweet. “This is the best game I’ve ever played. I couldn’t stop playing it!” and
you download it and it’s basically one step up from Pong.
Julie Szabo and Darren Barefoot, the authors of “Friends with Benefits: A
Social Media Marketing Handbook” and it’s a real book. You can hold it right
in your hands. You can hit people with it if you need to. It’s not an eBook and
you can find it on Amazon.com or just go to their website
friendswithbenefitsbook.com.
Darren and Julie, thank you so much.