Social Media Marketing and Optimization

I had the distinct pleasure of attending the first ever PRSA-NY Career, Internship & Continuing Education Forum this past Saturday. I was especially excited because the keynote speaker was going to be someone from Technorati. Derek Gordon, VP of Marketing at Technorati – to be exact. I confess I had a squee-moment.

Thankfully, he kept the speech short and to the point, since the event coordinators didn’t see it fit to give the attendees chairs (the exhibitors were supplied with chairs). It was a little unsettling, the lack of chairs, since we were instructed to dress in business attire. And to the young to mid-20-something, that means pointy toed heels.

Major physical discomfort aside, it was wonderful to hear him speak on the effects of social media on public relations… and marketing, to a degree, but as it was a PR event, he focused mainly on PR.

He started with a brief survey of the audience. Who uses a social network (MySpace, Facebook)? Who reads blogs? Who blogs? Who uses Twitter? Who is on Second Life? There were a few more questions that he presented, but I think those were the ones that I didn’t raise my hand for (maybe 2-3 total).

Next, he spoke of the current state of affairs. We’re swimming in an ocean of Web 2.0 buzzwords. Most of us know at least 50% of those terms (however, I do know people in the industry who still use Yahoo as their main search engine, rarely to never use Google, and had never heard of blogs or social media beyond MySpace and Facebook up till about 6 weeks ago). We are at the confluence of high speed/low cost/high quality internet service. It is incredibly easy to be your own publisher, your own distributor. It now takes a few clicks in under 5 minutes, not a large amount of effort over several weeks to see your product in others’ hands. Current events, creations, are now being shared in real time. As of April 28, 2007 – Technorati was indexing approximately 75 million blogs and 230 million tagged objects (videos, posts, pictures, and podcasts).

That’s a pretty large number. Two hundred and thirty million? People are talking. People are exchanging information. And we’re doing it all with a few mouse clicks. Who knew that we could have this level of integration 10 years ago?

He also outlined for us the two types of internet users. The first type is my group. The 15-30 yr olds. We grew up on, live with, and live on the web. We have multiple online profiles, and something he called ‘Continuous Partial Attention’. We can do 7 or more things at once, and be reasonably adept at all of them. Second type is the older generation. The late baby boomers, the early adopters, the blogger revolutionaries. Example: Perez Hilton. They can multitask, but to a far lesser degree.

The first hump exemplifies the power of WOM. Not only do we listen to our RL friends, we listen to our online peers too. If we see someone post/comment/IM about a great new service … we are more apt to listen to them, instead of the traditional marketing/advertising (which is still effective, but not to the degree it was in their heyday).

My experiences in PR have taught me to ask a few key questions before entering into a dialogue with anyone: 1) How do I get them to love me? 2) How do I sustain this dialogue (of love)? With all these social networks, these IMs – dialogues are inherent. Derek made it abundantly clear, that as an industry, PR needs to understand and be appealing enough to these social media users. They can’t just focus on the media – because the first type of internet users DOES NOT trust the [traditional] media as much as the generation before.

Communication is not one way. Communication is two way, we develop and sustain [loving] relationships. We have real voices, real personalities, we can differentiate between value and ‘talking points’. We have real feedback. We have real trust issues. Social media is bringing everyone closer together. We have more meaningful relationships (honestly, if anyone ever tells you that online relationships (I’m not talking creepy stalker type) aren’t real… they’re living in the Stone Age) worldwide than we ever had before.

Derek also had a cool anecdote about Germany and their PR agency… but I feel that I’ve been rambling for a bit too long.

Derek, I was so excited to speak with you on Saturday, I forgot to ask you a question that I had prepared: (if you could answer, that’d be great!)

What effect will social networks have on the ability to search? To what extent will Google and Yahoo’s control of information be moderated or reduced?

Public Relations

Social Media Marketing

Social Networks

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