Changing Industries

Infamous celebublogger Perez Hilton posted yesterday on his blog that there’s a reason why he hasn’t written about Leona Lewis — one of his favorite artists — in a while.

It’s because he’s being sued by her label, Sony BMG and its subsidiaries Jive and Zomba for posting widely distributed songs that were being attributed to Britney Spears. It turns out that the offending .mp3s were tracks that didn’t make it onto Spears’ newest album.

In Hilton’s words:

Sony BMG, and their labels Zomba and Jive, are suing us for streaming several songs that turned out to be by Britney Spears.

When these songs first leaked, there was a lot of doubt as to whether they were Britney or a fake. Plus, we never made any music downloadable.

Every time we saw a take-down notice from the R.I.A.A., we complied immediately. By the way, no one at Sony BMG ever contacted us about Britney.

Also, every song we posted - not knowing if it was or wasn’t an authentic Spears song - had already been all over the internet and fansites, yet PerezHilton.com is the only entity being sued by Sony BMG.

He lists a number of other talented people that he no longer covers, including my all-time favorite singer Christina Aguilera. He asked himself:

Because Zomba, which is owned by Sony BMG, is suing us and we had a lightbulb go off recently: we can’t support any artist signed to Sony BMG.

Why should we help the company suing us make money???? Especially when their lawsuit is personal!

The record industry has been notoriously backward when it comes to the Web. Their behavior towards Hilton has been no exception. It doesn’t matter much whether the gang at Sony BMG has a legitimate case against Hilton, it’s not in their long-term best interests to sue him.

Hilton may be reviled by many, but his coverage has helped to rocket some musicians from obscurity into the national spotlight. Musicians crave coverage on his site. A rave from him drives countless iTunes downloads.

If Hilton refuses to cover any artist signed to Sony BMG, you can expect that other artists will get the spotlight. That means lost revenues and lost opportunities. It would have been better to just send him a takedown notice and let the whole thing go away quietly.

in the article How Can a Company Protect Its Reputation on Web Sites? Ben Worthen of the Wall Street Journal writes about the realities of expunging negative information posted about your company on the Web. In many ways he gets it right, but in a few aspects, he’s a bit deficient in his coverage.

He implies that there’s not much you can do to demote negative content in Google search results, which is SO not true. We have a client who was involved in a lawsuit several years ago (which they won btw) and their attorney had posted about his efforts on their behalf. The content was not really all that negative, but it was the fifth item from the top when you searched for their name in Google. Our client wanted it sent to as far below the fold as possible, so largely thanks to our efforts, it moved from position 5 to position 65. It went from the first page of search results to the sixth.

How’d we do it? We launched a blog that mentioned them frequently and invoked a blogger engagement campaign that got others mentioning their name as well. It worked like a charm. Worthen references Daniel J. Solove, an associate professor at George Washington University Law School who is also a blogger, so I am guessing he concurs with us on the power of blogging.

Here are a few key quotes from the article and my thoughts.

“Once information finds its way online, it’s almost impossible to get it off.”
If he means that Google won’t forget about it, that’s generally true. Otherwise, pages come and go all the time.

“One thing not to bother with is so-called search-engine optimization, in which you hire consultants or buy software that’s supposed to make good information rise to the top of Google rankings.”
True. We’ve posted many times that most SEO efforts are largely ineffectual voodoo in comparison to spending the same money on content creation.

“A better bet is to confront the accusations head on. If a blogger writes that your company has poor customer service, leave a comment on the site saying you’re trying to fix the problem. Similarly, never ignore false rumors, as these can spread like wildfire on the Internet. Mr. Solove says to address the rumor on your Web site as early as possible.”
We couldn’t agree more.

Want some help pushing the bad stuff down? We’re happy to help.

There’s a five-part series at Copyblogger called SEO Copywriting 2.0.

It’s a really cool and useful breakdown of what you can do with your copy to really boost your results in Google. I’d recommend reading the whole series for good ideas on how you can tailor your blog posts for a better showing.

But it’s a five part series, and let’s face it, most of us are lazy. So here’s the big not-so-secret secret: almost 90% of what you can do to get good search results is get linked to.

As Brian Clark puts it:

That’s why any true SEO copywriter is simply a writer who has a knack for tuning in to the needs and desires of the target audience. And due to the pursuit of links, those needs and desires have to be nailed well before you’ll ever show up in the search engines.

…

“Ask yourself what creates value for your users,” sayeth Google. As those brainy engineers continue to diligently create better algorithms, combined with people-powered social media tagging and blog-driven links, copywriters with a flair for prompting link response and conversions will become vital members of any search engine marketing effort.

In other words, good SEO copywriting is linkbait.

I think that it goes a little bit farther than that, though: I’m betting on Google. Google’s entire business is based around providing the best search results to whoever is searching.

So my strategy has always been this:

1. Who do I want to reach?
2. What are they searching for?
3. What is the best response to that question?

And that’s what I try to write.

Eric Goldman reported yesterday on American Airlines’ decision to sue Google (pdf link) over their keyword advertising practices:

This complaint pleads the usual claims for this type of action, including direct, contributory and vicarious trademark infringement (I don’t know why the vicarious claim was made; it’s deficiently pleaded); a false advertising claim that the “sponsored link” language communicates a false impression of actual sponsorship; dilution; various “soft” state claims (unfair competition; misappropriation and others); and tortious interference with contract because Google allegedly knew that American’s distributors weren’t supposed to buy American’s trademarks as keywords.

Eric’s got a lot more legal chops than I do, but it sounds to me like American Airlines thinks that they’re losing business because Google is allowing other airline services to advertise against the American Airlines trademark. In other words, Google is letting competitors trade on the AA name.

I’m not really sure what they’re trying to accomplish with this suit. The only thing I can think of is those TV commercials where they say “compared to other leading brands” instead of “compared to Coke.”

The idea, I think, is that you can’t use another product’s name in your ad. You can suggest it, but you can’t use it. Advertising on Google against AA is a little bit like using another product name in your ad. I wonder if it’s close enough.

We’re testing a new tool that is showing promise as an effective engine for measuring the tone of blog posts (but not comments–yet…) as they relate to a specific product or company. We’d love to include some of your data into the research, and would provide you the results free of charge. All we ask is that you take the time to cross-reference the results to your own analysis and tell us how the system performed.

The only data we need is: 1) A list of permalinks to posts that discuss a company or product, and 2) the name of the company or product.

We’ll send you back the list of links with an attached rating to each permalink: positive, negative, or neutral.

If you’re interested, just email me: steve AT blog business summit dot com (no spaces.)

I effing *love* Hugh Macleod!

[Via Jake McKee with regard to our lovely impromptu chat last week.]

Jake Mckee — a.k.a. the Community Guy — is one of my favorite people I’ve met since I got into this blogging thing. He’s graciously accepted our request that he speak at the conference this September. I had a nice chat with him via AOL Instant Messenger this morning. We talked about how traditional marketers approach communities, how they should approach communities, and why the Web changed everything.

Jake articulates some of the most important ideas in online community building so very well. I’m really looking forward to his sessions at BBS07. Transcript of the conversation after the jump.
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Wired’s Scott Gilbertson has an excellent point about Facebook: it’s a walled garden. Personal data goes in, and it doesn’t come out.

He’s not the first to complain, nor is he the first person to propose a solution. But I liked the way he articulated the next step in the process of opening the Web:
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Wired ran an article yesterday that encapsulates one of the biggest problems with the emerging Web. The money quote:

For people who’ve grown up in analog, Second Life is not that hard to understand,” says Rishad Tobaccowala, CEO of Denuo, a consulting arm of the global ad giant Publicis Groupe. “I have a store in the real world; I have a store in the virtual world.” In contrast, the kind of digital marketing that actually works requires a conceptual leap. Successful online marketing is targeted and specific, like direct mail — but it’s direct mail in a fun house, where the recipients can easily seize control of what the mail says, where it goes next, and how it gets there. You need to know how to buy up keywords to maximize search returns, how to make the most of recommendation engines, how to use the viral potential of Web video, how to monitor what’s being said in blogs and message boards, how not to blow it by trying to be deceptive. Building a corporate pavilion in Second Life doesn’t require any of these things. It’s simple and it’s obvious.

The lesson here is pretty straightforward: online community building isn’t about fancy technology or flashy corporate pavilions in 3-D worlds. It’s about enabling people to connect with one another in ways that are meaningful to them. As Liz Strauss told me, you can’t have a community without people.

Since we launched our BlogTips Facebook application twelve days ago, several trackable conference registrations have been the direct result. I calculate a 43.75% net ROI in approximately 1/30 of a year. If you multiply that out, that’s an annualized 1,300% rate of return on the investment. Not too shabby.

By some metrics, it’s the single most effective marketing campaign I’ve ever been involved in — especially when we’ve only launched a 1.0 widget with limited functionality. Admittedly, we haven’t scaled to a volume where it’s a main driver of revenue (yet,) but it’s clear to us that this is an arena that shows great promise. It’s also a heck of a lot easier than fighting over AdWords terms.
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Michael Gray from Graywolf’s SEO Blog has a wonderfully helpful video up on YouTube that shows the search engine optimization downside of using WordPress and how to get around it.

According to Gray, one of the biggest issues with WP from an SEO standpoint is that it puts content in a lot of different places:

• Main Index
• Categories
• Date Archives
• Author Archives

Duplicate content is a major problem in SEO because it confuses Google. When Google is confused, it gives lower priority to your content. You want to keep nice little silos for all of your information.

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If I were responsible for giving the Sprit of the Blogosphere Award, I’d give it to Liz Strauss. Our speaker Andy Sernovitz put us in touch. I had a really lovely chat with her yesterday and came away with a renewed vigor for blogging. That’s usually how I know I’ve had a great conversation with someone.

One of the things that struck me during our chat was that “online community building” is becoming a buzz word, kind of like “synergy” or “paradigm.” She told me a story about a corporate marketer who told her that he was going to build a community on his company’s website. She asked him what he would do to get the people to come there and how he would work with them. He kept returning to the “community” angle, and she kept asking, “but what about the people?”

Liz has an astonishing number of comments — tens of thousands, in fact — on her blog. She’s very proud of this. She hosts open comment nights and spends inordinate amounts of time getting to know her readers. She explained to me that the secret to good blogging is understanding that your posts should be conversation starters rather than statements. The only way to really engage with people is to leave your posts unfinished.

About halfway through our conversation, I started feeling guilty. I realized that I didn’t spend nearly enough time engaging with the commenters on any of the blogs I write for. I asked her, “how do I make sure that my commenters understand that I do care about them when there just aren’t enough hours in the day?”

“You just did,” she replied. “You show up. You read what they’ve written and you make sure they know you were there.”

The moral of this story is that the business buzzword of “online community building” doesn’t really cover what needs to happen when a company sets out to build a community around their brand. Many corporate marketers seem to be approaching the issue with an “if you build it, they will come” mentality. But if you want to have a successful online community, you need to step out from behind your role as company spokesperson/spin-doctor and actually talk to people. Talk to them like you talk to your friends. Be yourself.

This mentality — which represents a real paradigm shift, not just a buzzword — will be a subject of renewed focus at the conference this September. We’ll be talking about technology and numbers and ROI to be sure, but we’ll also be talking about the real power of social media: the people that use it.

As many of our conference attendees know, I put a high priority on finding news and relevant content hidden away in traditional HTML so we can introduce it into the RSS ecosystem. Done right, it avoids contributing to the echo chamber and creates what economists call a “Pareto Efficient Allocation” — where everyone involved is made better off and no one is made worse off.

A classic example of this surrounds a post I made today on our bigbusinessjet site. Here’s the chronology:

1) My favorite Firefox Plugin Update Scanner noticed one of the better (yet archaic) HTML subject expert sites we monitor has a new article posted. Aviation gurus Conklin & de Decker have written a piece about aircraft leasing. See below, as Update Scan even highlights the new item on the page.

2) Click through to the article and read.

Notice: At this stage Google has not noticed that the article exists.

Nor has Google indexed anything (yet) with the same string I used for my post headline.

3) Write an overview post, link back, and encourage readers to click through.
We get a nice post, relevant to our readers, Conklin & de Decker gets an inbound link and the resulting traffic. We win, Conklin & de Decker wins, and (see below) readers that previously had no idea this content existed can now find it.

The good news: 5 minutes later Google has indexed my post.

The not-so-good news (which should self-correct in a few hours/days:) Google sees us, but not Conklin & de Decker yet for the article title search string.

We’ll follow this over the next few days and see what Google picks up on and when.

We recently completed development of our very first application for Facebook. The application is called BlogTips and it enables users to share their tips for what makes a great blog with their friends and the wider blogging community on Facebook.

Last week I posted that we’re eating our own dog food by building this Facebook widget. Building applications that add value to existing communities is one of the best ways to get the word out about anything.

In fact, usefulness appears to be the new #1 rule of online marketing. If your blog doesn’t provide any useful information, nobody will read it. I guarantee that your audience isn’t interested in your corporate marketing talk or the latest press release. They want real, practical information that adds value to their daily lives. The same is true of applications for social networks. People don’t want to stick your advertising on their profiles. But if you provide something that they’ll find useful, they’ll be more interested in helping you get the word out.

We sincerely hope that our contribution to the growing library of Facebook applications is a useful one. Of course, if you’ve tried it out and you think it stinks, we want to know that, too. Leave us a comment, link to this post, or drop me an e-mail if you have feedback either way.

I’ve had a couple of friends cite the recent incident at Google as a good reason why companies should stay out of the blogosphere. The fracas got started when a Google blogger shared her personal opinion of Michael Moore’s controversial new documentary on one of company’s blogs. The blogosphere assumed that her opinion represented that of the company and decided to tar and feather Google for being insensitive to the needs of America’s uninsured.

It’s true that if you give your employees a megaphone, sooner or later, one of them is going to use it to say something you’d rather they hadn’t. They’re human beings, human beings screw up, and screwups are a part of business. You learn and you move on.

Google is taking that approach to the incident. Today, a Google spokesperson told the San Francisco Chronicle, “we hope to get even better at it over time, but we’ll probably also make more mistakes.”

The beauty of blogs is that they help to put a human face on a monolithic company. But human faces have wrinkles, scars and imperfections. In many ways, the issue facing companies today is similar to the central dilemma of Stephen Frears’ masterpiece The Queen (iTunes).

In the film, Queen Elizabeth II (Helen Mirren) is bowled over by the public outpouring of grief in the wake of Princess Diana’s death. Diana’s foibles and flaws put a beautiful human face on the British monarchy, and the people loved her for it. But from the Queen’s perspective, Diana’s death is a private one. She sees no place for a royal presence in the mourning period for an ex-HRH.

The British people disagree. Diana was a beloved public figure and still a member of the royal family in their eyes. When the Queen neglects to properly share in their grief, she becomes a target. At the height of the public outcry, one in four Britons are of the opinion that the monarchy should be abolished outright.

As the Queen so eloquently puts it to her mother, “there’s been a fundamental shift in values.”

Corporations are a bit like the British crown. They struggle to be understood by ordinary people. So when an opportunity to humanize any monolithic organization comes along, it should not be ignored. Even at the risk of mistakes.

I don’t mean to say that every corporation should immediately start blogging and try to make mistakes. But they should be aware of, and accept that mistakes come with the territory. In the end, it’s better to screw up and apologize than never to take a risk at all.

The marketers present here at FiRe not only seem to embracing social media as a great way to drive sales, but in at least two cases, it’s been the only/main way they have promoted their wares.

From the podium this morning, Dave Winer was asked if there was a business model for podcasters. His response was that one might not get paid directly for podcasting, but there might be indirect revenues. As an example, he said that Scripting News was successful in generating sales revenues (I assume for Userland Software) and yet the business never took out ads. Winer indicated that his blog was the key traffic driver.

During lunch I was fortunate enough to sit next to Simon Hackett who is the founder and managing director of Internode Systems, and Agile Communications. Coincidentally, Internode also has not spent any money to speak of on traditional outreach and yet has been extremely successful. Simon told me that much of their success has been due to the positive word of mouth exposure gained from hundreds of hours he’s spent monitoring and contributing to the broadband community forum whirlpool.

CBS’s first attempt at providing its content online met with less than enthusiastic results. The reception has been so bad that CBS’s new internet strategist recently told the Wall Street Journal that the URL for its online media service should be called “CBS.com/nobodycomeshere.”

So CBS is changing gears. They’re making deals left and right to make their content available for free in at least ten different web-based venues. I was particularly excited to read that they’re in talks with Facebook to allow users to share CBS video on their profiles.

To succeed, media companies will need to get used to the idea that the natural habitat of content is no longer restricted to one format or one viewing platform. By opening their content up to a number of different channels, CBS is embracing this concept wholeheartedly.

There are takeaways here for businesses that are not traditional media companies. Remember what John Battelle said about all companies being publishers? It’s still true. And since all businesses are publishers, they need to make sure that their content is just as available to the people they want to reach as CBS does.

Here are some general things to think about:

1. How do(es) your company blog(s) look on mobile phone browsers?
2. Are your podcasts buried on your company website, or can people find them in podcast directories?
3. Is your content being repurposed anywhere? How can you add additional value for people who view your content in that format?
4. How many different ways are you enabling people to share your content? How does it display on Facebook’s shared links service? Do you have links that let them share it on Digg?
5. Are you getting click through from people’s Google Reader link blogs? Find out who is sharing your content and thank them.

The recent admission by Microsoft’s marketing group that the tremendous community reaction to their “Mad World” TV spot for the game Gears of War was not an intended side effect of the ad campaign got me thinking about what Jeremiah Owyang wrote a couple of months ago about community vs. viral marketing.

When it comes to creating viral videos, Jeremiah advises marketers to “stop trying to do something unattainable.” Because while we can dissect viral phenomena and learn from them, it’s almost impossible to create one outright. Viral content is defined in part by its spontaneity. And the conditions under which a carefully crafted marketing message can take off to become a viral scenario involve more luck than good planning.

Blogger Long Zheng seems to agree with this, writing in his post about the Microsoft admission, “the more you try the less it will happen again.”

I think this incident further reinforces the reality that online marketing must be driven by good old-fashioned blood sweat and tears. That is:

1. Build relationships.
2. Be transparent and honest and human.
3. Demonstrate that you care about what your customers care about.

Sure, think about stickiness and how people might do/make stuff with your advertising. But don’t expect that you can replicate the magic. And don’t promise your clients/boss that you can replicate the magic. In fact, don’t even try to replicate the magic. You’ll jinx yourself. Instead, focus on community-building. There’s way more ROI there.

Chris Pirillo has nine excellent points about how to do business on the Web. I’d like to expand on his first point.

Chris writes:

It’s not just about having an open mind; it’s about having an open strategy. You can’t control the Internet. Once you put something out there for the world to consume, assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered. It doesn’t matter if it’s audio, video, text, software, hardware or any other service—they’ll want to use it in ways that you can’t even imagine.

This is what Michael Raynor was talking about when he told PR Squared’s Todd Defren that social media injects additional uncertainty into business operations.

And it has more serious implications than the simple re-purposing of content. Businesses need to approach all aspects of social media with an open strategy. Unlike traditional marketing efforts, nobody can control the pace or subject matter of a conversation online. Each individual that participates can take any discussion or line of thought in myriad new ways.

So how does traditional goal-setting jibe with this lack of control? I think it works something like this:

1. Set a reasonable goal for your online interaction.
2. Listen to each individual and how the community responds to the individual.
3. Ask intelligent questions and listen to the responses.
4. Ask, “is my reasonable goal still reasonable?”
5. Either adjust goals to fit community response, or take another step toward your goal.
6. Repeat steps 2-5.

What do you guys think?