Selling Tomorrows

My New White Paper: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups

My apologies for skipping out on posts the last month...I've been working on a very exciting white paper that has entered the wild today: The CMO's Guide to Tweetups.  Nine delicious pages chock full of research, rationales, strategies and tactics designed to help CMO's and heads of public relations at Business-to-Business companies use launch their own tweetups. 

While most of the tips came from my experience at NASA's tweetup of the launch of shuttle Atlantis in November, all the strategic sections are based on Makovsky's work with B2B's that sell complex services, products and -- at its root -- ideas to customers and investors.

For many companies in this space, using social media at all, much less hosting a tweetup, can seem strange. But as readers of this blog know, when it comes to complex ideas, there's no better medium for educating audiences, and then engaging them all the way down the marketing funnel than social media. 

I invite you to take a read and add your thoughts in the comments section below.

How to Launch a Tweetup: Lessons from NASA

If it wasn't clear from my exuberant coverage a couple weeks ago, NASA PR completely rocked the tweetup of STS-129. Here's an excerpt from a piece I had published today in Bulldog Reporter on what NASA did right -- that any company can learn from and copy.  A white paper with the 35 things that NASA did right is coming out shortly.  Leave a comment or shoot me an email if you'd like to be on the mailing list for it.

If any of my #NASAtweetup tweeps are reading this, I'd love your input below on what YOU thought NASA did right in cultivating a community online.

"You may not have a spaceship, but your company has a fan base. Maybe they're customers who have relied on your product for decades and feel it belongs more to them than to you. Maybe they're engineers who appreciate how hard it is to create new kinds of paint—or improve the flavor of Tastykakes. Maybe they're investors fascinated with the countries where your company does business. They won't think of themselves as fans until they're in a room with like-minded people. They won't think of themselves as members of a community until you bring them together. And you can't be accepted as a part of that community—reaping all the sales, visibility, credibility and even free labor—until you get tweeting."

Read the full article here.

How the Human Side of Twitter can Backfire for Public Companies

Gene Marbach, Makovsky colleague and author of the IRThereforeIAM investor relations blog, has a great post today on how corporate efforts to express a personality on mediums like Twitter can fuel rumors.  This isn't to say you shouldn't express the human side via Twitter -- in fact, it's one of the biggest benefits social media offers to publicly traded companies -- just that you need to have an investor relations filter along with the customer, regulatory, employee and other filters in place when you use these powerful tools. Snip:

"People can tweet about the most inane and trivial matters; however, seemingly innocuous information can lead to rampant rumor-mongering. As CEOs tend to hang out with other CEOs, mentioning a social lunch date could lead to speculation about a merger between the companies. A visit to a doctor can touch off speculation about an illness."

Read the full post here.

"Findability" Now the Primary Concern of Marketing - Jonathan Blank

Social media guru and Makovsky colleague Jonathan Blank has written a must-read post on his blog, b2bcoffeeshops.com, about the importance of "findability."  It was just recognized as one of the top five social media posts of the day by Sarah Evans, the moderator of #journchat.

Snip:

But today when you pick up that phone, stick on the stamp or press the send button, you do so knowing there are fewer people on the other end and those that are still there are probably ignoring you. Against this backdrop of outbound marketing getting less effective, findability has become the primary concern of the entire marketing department - business unit marketing, content marketing, public relations, search engine optimization...Focus your marketing on making your content more relevant and more extraordinary. Make it easily shareable. Use it as a response to the content of competitors. Yes, actually talk openly about how your conclusions compare to that of others. Take the time to Google your experts and see if their digital footprint matches up with their point of views. Are they easily found? Are they easily connected with? (Read full post here)

It's Not the Shuttle Launch that Makes NASA's Tweetup a Success - It's the Right Topic + Right People

Given some stereotypes of social media users (I just told a reporter from the German Press Agency that the Star Trek ones are true :) ) this group is not a bunch of people who prefer to stare at their iPhones instead of making eye contact.  In fact, their most defining characteristic is the ability to have a great conversation.  They're interesting and interested.  Their hyper sharing online translates into hyper helpfulness offline.  And given the friendly nature of the technical social channels, there's much more of a "we're all in this together" feel than you would find at a space-focused industry conference.  So this tweetup, far from comprised of 100 geeks who can fill out an online form really fast, is a precision filter for knowledgeable, passionate and uber-information sharing members of the new media. 

And since EVERY company works in a sector where people are passionate about its ideas, ANY company can enjoy similar success with atweetup.  No space shuttle required.

Forget the Shuttle Launch: Real Story is Collission of Traditional and Social Media

I thought I was attending this Tweetup to cover the shuttle launch.  But I've found a better story:  the real-time collision of traditional and social media spheres.  Consider that we've got 101 Tweeters in their own media tent right next to the CBS and NBC buildings.  There's a FOX News van parked outside.  Journalists and twitterers are both eating the same gross hot dogs at the roach coach; no velvet line separating the two.    

Some reporters have popped in to do segments, and the neat thing is we're doing segments on THEM, as they do segments on US!  We're a spectacle, they're spectacle, and whichever flavor the audience -- all of you out there -- want, can be had with a click. 

I've interviewed four journalists and six tweeps so far today and learned two things:

1. Journos are clearly nervous about the state of journalism, but they don't see social channels as a threat.  Rather, they want in on what WE'RE doing.  They love the enthusiasm; one clearly wished she could adopt our pro-romantic approach instead of sticking to the ethically required staid style. Another fully believes social coverage enhances interest in the topics that they're covering in different ways.

So I asked Miles O'Brien how Social Media is Beating Traditional Press at its own Game...

Miles O'Brien was a featured speaker at today's NASA Tweetup for STS-129.  After a terrific speech (watch it here via UStream)about how the internet has changed journalism, he was kind enough to share his thoughts with me on how the quality of information delivered via social channels can be superior to that found in traditional media.  Listen carefully because I think Miles coined a new term that should resonate in social circles...the "editorial commons." 

You can follow Miles on Twitter and check out his site here. 

Can't wait for...

A Piece of Under the Dome, A Piece of a Brilliant Social Media Strategy

There's a brilliant social media strategy in motion right now for Stephen King's new book, Under the Dome.  The book's website is giving out the text snippet by snippet (5,196 pieces in all), encouraging people to distribute them through their social networks or in the physical world so that others can assemble them into a free online version.  It's hide-and-seek meets a wiki meets social media.  It's the coolest marketing idea I've seen since Sony's holographic dragon popped out of Toyko Bay (what? you haven't seen the video?  Well here it is.)

So for all those treasure hunters out there, here's the piece of Under the Dome I received today:

____________________

believe he's dirty?'
    She did not hesitate. 'With all my heart.' Because Howie believed it - that's good enough for me.
    'And you remember what's in the file?'
    'Not the exact figures and the names of all the banks they used, but enough.'
    'Then he'll believe you,' Barbie said. 'With or without a second copy of the paperwork, 

______________________

And here's a challenge I'd like to propose...let's find the brilliant person who came up with this idea.  I'm sure this is a well-guarded secret since the marketing effort is supposed to promote the book, not the marketer, but genius like this can't be left stuck under a...a...dome. 

Recessipedia Launches to Avoid Repeat of Financial Crisis

Proud to report that my company's six-month effort with the Museum of American Finance has come to fruition today.  Recessipedia.org is a wiki designed to tap the wisdom of crowds to figure out what happened to cause the financial crisis. Check out the Wall Street Journal's coverage here and our press release here. Snip:

"Modeled on Wikipedia, Recessipedia's articles can be created, written and edited by anyone. But unlike Wikipedia, the Museum's wiki has a distinct goal of investigating past events.  The wiki also collects first-person accounts and welcomes people and organizations to contribute their own points of view about what happened leading up to and during the crisis. "