Digital Marketing Commentary (Now With 15% More Snark!)

When a client expresses their fears at extending themselves in social media, I tell them not to be. The number one concern is negative user generated content, whether true, untrue, or just a misunderstanding.

To which I say…

1) If you get negative content from a user, and its unwarranted, other users will comment & respond on your behalf. This kind of brand evangelism actually strengthens the brand, because it is content in your favor that would not have been posted otherwise.

2) If the negative comment does have some merit, then it gives you a chance to address the issue in a public forum. You can reply in the same venue, and while you are ostensibly responding one-to-one, it’s actually one-to-many. The chances are good you’re answering a question that many people want to hear an answer for, and its a question or issue there wasn’t an answer for elsewhere.

This is a response opportunity because it’s a chance to show how much your brand listens to its customers. Its a chance to publicly address concerns and resolve problems. Its a chance to find out how you can make yourself better, as a company, as a brand. It’s not a crisis, or even a cris-a-tunity. It’s a real opportunity, and should bring hope, not fear, to an informed client.

I am blown away by the cleverness so far of Day In The Cloud, the Virgin America and Google Apps co-production. The “cloud” isn’t just a reference to what you fly through, either – it’s referring to the “computing cloud”, the concept that Google Apps embodies and embraces.

Virgin America/Google have followed some really nice best practices here with their setup:

Day in the Cloud Page

The page is nicely laid out, there’s a Twitter feed at the bottom of it, there’s “share” buttons, and by having people sign up for practice clues, they’re building an email list for Virgin America as well as for the event. They are also promoting the event through the official Google blog and through ads in Google Reader RSS feeds. Of course, Google owns feedburner so that could be how I was served the banner that led me to the promo.

I actually am a huge fan of the Virgin Air brands in general. I love their emphasis on technology – wifi and TV access on all planes. And this is a great way to get their audience onto their planes: people like me, who will share this event through Twitter and Facebook and blogging. My friends who read about this promo will also prefer to be on planes with wifi, TV and mood lighting. This totally eliminates the quandary of wasted media dollars, because the advertising will only self-promote to people likely to take interest.

Of course, Virgin is a perfect brand to pull off this kind of social media initiative, but they are also taking a big hint from Google’s best practices. I ran a Google search this morning to see how many results came up for the exact phrase “day in the cloud”, and only three came up that were related to this promo. I’d bet that when I run the exact same search in a week, the most of the first page of search results will be dedicated to this promotion, and it will all be part of UGC like this entry. I love seeing good use of social media like this.

1) “Bing” is not going to replace “Google” as a verb, because then it would be “binged”

2) When you launch your new search engine, it TOTALLY helps to at least own all the organic search results for that word on said search engine.

Bing search partial FAIL!

External Link: Search for “Bing” on Microsoft Bing

I am an old-school Internet nerd. I have been online for fifteen years now. I used to haunt the alt.net boards, Majordomo-based mailing lists and IRC, and actually remember “gopher”. What used to be called “netiquette” was a big deal to me. Had a marketing person started abusing those communities to promote a product, I would have jumped, immediately, on the Hissyfit Bandwagon.

Which is why, today, I try to have a modicom of sensibility when posting about my clients on Wikipedia. A lot of companies view Wikipedia as the organic search goldmine. That’s true. But it’s not a community that you can go posting your press releases in. Wikipedia is the product of thousands of people’s intelligence, work and dedication to the act of sharing knowledge. And, while it can be manipulated temporarily (as Stephen Colbert proved), it also reaches equilibrium again very quickly.

When sharing on Wikipedia, I have to ask clients – why is your company significant? It’s not enough just to want a post because it’s there. I have to craft and write the entry to show that company’s relationship to the rest of the world. I’ve added “Popular Culture” sections for some clients, where their companies are synonymous with pieces of the zeitgeist. (It’s a side fascination of mine, the way that brand names are now cultural reference points, metaphors, in American society). If a company has become part of commercial culture, if they have groundbreaking products, if they have somehow achieved some significance, then I can find a way to justify the post.

I thought, originally, that learning the Wiki markup language was the hurdle to Wikipedia. It isn’t. Being truly part of the community is the hard part. I do contribute as an individual – I added an article on the MV Kirkland last week, a boat which I logged a lot of hours on back in 2002. (It’s haunted!) But when I’m writing an article on a client from scratch, I first strip it of marketing speak, re-write it, and then take it to the editors and the admins to make sure it’s appropriate.

Social media is a conversation – not just between the brand & its consumers, but also between the brand and the community it wants to be part of. When you post a company’s information on Wikipedia, you’re not just taking advantage of its SEO traffic. Thinking like that gets the post deleted. You’re contributing knowledge to a community dedicated to sharing and learning. When you think about it like that, promoting products seems a little petty…and that’s exactly the mentality that anyone should have before trying to use the world’s largest encyclopedia for PR purposes.