Humdinger: MarketHum's blog on marketing, media, innovation and community

Journalists: We Use Blogs to Research Stories

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 15:21:50 +0000

(Via Shel Holtz): The Arketi Group has released a new study saying that 84% of journalists either have used or would use blogs as a primary or secondary source while researching an article. So that puts to be the older notion, pushed by some traditional media sources, that blogs are just linking to traditional media. It’s an ecosystem.

A blog can be a really powerful part of a company’s overall media mix. Let us help!

Google’s OpenSocial

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Wed, 31 Oct 2007 20:17:23 +0000

I’m so excited about OpenSocial that I blogged about it not once, but twice over on my personal blog.

How Facebook Ranks Stories

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 16:42:12 +0000

Here’s an interesting post about the factors Facebook takes into account when choosing whether or not to incorporate your friends’ stories into your feed. I never realized how overwhelming it would be to see all of them. Of course, they limit how many they show, and the cream rises to the top based on social search: whose profile pages you visit, whose walls you write on, who you tag in photos, who you invite to events and so forth.

Thanks to Pam Hilborn, Director of Online Customer Experience at Indigo.ca, for the link.

Content Management – Not So Easy After All

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 15:16:58 +0000

One of the most popular MarketHum products is our business blogging solution, the Thought Leadership Communities. So I was of course interested when I saw an ad from Vignette pop up in my Gmail as follows:

Blogs on the next level - The simplicity of blogs. The power of global collaboration.

Vignette is a content management system. I wanted to see what they were up to, so I clicked through to a page that advertised a whitepaper demonstrating the ROI of their “next-generation web solution” effective at “business blogging” and “social websites”.

They described the whitepaper as follows:

“Nucleus Research, the ROI experts, analyzed the business benefits of Catholic Health Initiative’s ambitious investments in Web-based collaboration and communication. Grab your own copy of this 3rd-party ROI case study to see the hard dollar benefits of online community.”

So I gave them a bunch of my personal information and they sent me the whitepaper - the wrong whitepaper, about a different Nucleus ROI study of their standard CMS implementation at Ball State University.

Bait and switch, or just poor content management? Either way, it looks bad for Vignette.

I have followed other companies’ Google ads before, to broken links and DNS errors. Perhaps it’s time for a little quality assurance initiative in your marketing department?

Jeff Jarvis on Dell

Hylton Jolliffe — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 03:30:03 +0000

Jeff Jarvis looks back at his saga with Dell and reports on a recent visit to its headquarters.

A quote from Michael Dell that echoes advice what we’ve given clients about engaging via blogs: “These conversations are going to occur whether you like it or not, O.K.? Well, do you want to be part of that or not? My argument is you absolutely do. You can learn from that. You can improve your reaction time. And you can be a better company by listening and being involved in that conversation.”

More goodness from later in the article: “Michael Dell predicts that customer relationships will ‘continue to be more intimate.’ He even speaks of ‘co-creation of products and services,’ a radical notion from a giant manufacturer. ‘I’m sure there’s a lot of things that I can’t even imagine, but our customers can imagine,’ Dell says, still sounding very bloggish. ‘A company this size is not going to be about a couple of people coming up with ideas. It’s going to be about millions of people and harnessing the power of those ideas.’”

Our Interview with Jackie Huba

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 12:26:35 +0000

Our latest interview with Jackie Huba (her blog), the co-author of “Citizen Marketers: When People are the Message” and author of “Creating Customer Evangelists: How Loyal Customers Become a Volunteer Sales Force”.

A snippet: “The latest research shows that 87% of people who want to buy something will research it online before they buy it… that content is word of mouth, and it’s very influential when it comes to buying decisions.”

Tune in here for the full interview.

MSNBC Buys User-Driven Content Tool

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 09:39:46 +0000

Rex Sorgatz, Executive Producer of MSNBC, announced in his blog last Sunday that they were buying Newsvine, a user-prioritized, editor-less news site where site users post snippets of news, vote and comment on the articles.

Showing remarkable insight for a traditional media guy, Sorgatz noted, “‘audience’ isn’t even the right word anymore.”

Mainstream media is broken, and fixing it, Sorgatz says, means offering “news as conversation, as a network, as a platform. By reconstituting media as participation, Newsvine suddenly makes news fun and engaging again.”

Two thumbs up for this smart move.

Google buys Jaiku

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:56:19 +0000

Cool news! Jaiku is getting acquired by Google. I’m happy for them because I thought those guys were pretty cool when I met them at Supernova. Not full of themselves, and really earnest, and doing no evil. Good luck to them!

Your Customer Has Been Conditioned Not to Trust You

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:09:44 +0000

Another Tom Asacker quote from our call:
“Customers don’t trust businesses or the people running them, and I think that any kind of business that somehow has fooled themselves into believing that they have earned customers’ trust — they’re deluded. And that will affect how they approach their customer base. They need to understand that people are skeptical of everything that they say and they do. Because we’ve been conditioned that way over the past ten years, with everything from Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Adelphia, Arthur Andersen, Xerox, to Catholic priests, Major League Baseball steroids, Martha Stewart – everywhere we look we see this kind of thing. We’re conditioned to distrust. So that’s what’s gone on. We have been conditioned by the activities in the marketplace over the past 50 or 60 years, which makes today’s mindset of the customer much much different than the mindset of 1940’s and 50’s people.”

What this means to me is that the marketer must relearn how to have a real conversation. By this I mean that they must allow for different opinions, instead of acting like a dictatorship where dissenting voices are hidden or silenced. This, along with listening, is the only way they can earn trust back. Companies no longer enjoy implicit authority. Those days are over, thanks to endless product choices (crumbling monopolies), the burnt bridges Tom mentions, and the amplifying power the Internet gives to word of mouth.

Understand What They’re Feeling

Isabel Walcott Hilborn — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 17:46:52 +0000

Here’s another quote from the interview with Tom Asacker.

“That’s what marketing was all about. It was ‘how do I send a message to an audience and create this fantasy and this image and this promise?’ … And now it’s ‘how do I get a community involved, and how do I deal with real people and real expectations?’ And it’s a lot harder to do that because you have to get close to people and understand what’s on their minds and what they’re feeling.”

It’s just like you read in those books about dating. The first step in reaching people and getting their attention isn’t talking… it’s listening.