Brouhaha in the Blogsophere

My oh my! This week we witnessed a blogger blitz of a social media marketing effort gone awry. The short version of the story is that a competitive absinthe brand hired a PR agency who evidently didn't understand how to work with bloggers. They made some egregious mistakes (cloaked spam) and were taken to task by a "murder" (to borrow the descriptor of a group of crows) of bloggers.

Significantly, many of the bloggers gave a shoutout to BAT as well as several other agencies and companies that are doing social media marketing the RIGHT way. (Thank you...we appreciate the vote of confidence!)

There's a lesson here for marketers in the Internet age. Invest the time to really understand the new media, how it works and how it's different from the old. But if you're not going to do that, make sure you conduct due diligence on the resources you hire to do it for you. In this case, the damage done far outweighed the planned short term gain.

Spam and subterfuge are not workable strategies...transparency and contribution to the conversation are. Promoting a brand commercially is part of the process, but it must be in a way that's beneficial to all and most importantly the end reader. When you game a blogger, you also insult their reader...who is your prospective customer. To paraphrase David Ogilvy, "She's not a moron, she's your wife."

You can check out the brouhaha here (and be advised, this was a passionate subject...some of the language isn't fit for children):

Cocktailnerd
Sloshed!
ArtofDrink
ScofflawsDen
DrinkPlanner
TraderTiki
Two at the Most
An Exercise in Hospitality
A Mountain of Crushed Ice
Cocktail Chronicles
Looka
A Jigger of Blog
Dear PR Flack Sphere: Related Content

Defining Social Media Marketing

More and more clients are coming to us for Social Media Marketing Services, and I've found there's a lot of misunderstanding on just what Social Media is, and how to categorize and define the components.

Simply stated, Social Media are online places where conversations take place among people with similar interests. And those conversations can in the form of words, images, video and audio. Social Media Marketing (Other names for it include Word of Mouth Marketing, 1 to 1 Marketing, Consumer or User Generated Content, etc.) is really just a subset of marketing...marketing that takes place in digital form over the Internet within social media.

We recognize five flavors of SMM and I've highlighted the key points that differentiate them:

1. Blogs: Blogs are essentially a diary with the point of view of one person and reflect their interest, bias and "voice"...Less of a conversation, more of a monolog. Examples include CocktailNerd and Fermentation.

2. Sites, Forums, Wikis: These are sort of like a sister to Blogs...they are conversations that are moderated and usually without a bias or point of view. On the spirits side, recipes drive the category, on the wine side it's ratings, reviews and food and wine pairings. Examples include Cocktails.About.com and Wine Library TV Forum.

3. Social Networks: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube, Wine 2.0 are examples. The conversation on social networks is not moderated and it takes place between and among like minded individuals who link to each other as "friends" and through "groups".

4. Search: Finding information online based on other people's searches. In our world search is conducted on general sites such as Google or vertical sites such as Wine-searcher.com. Search comes in two flavors as well...organic and paid (aka PPC, Google AdWords/AdSense).

5. E-Commerce: ...buying and selling stuff online. OK, it's not really SMM, but it is a critical digital marketing strategy and commerce is conversation. It applies to consumer sites such as BevMax as well as trade sites like BevAccess

It's that simple. Sphere: Related Content

“New Media Marketing” in the International Drinks Business

I'm at our booth at the London International Wine Fair/Distil and I am surprised at the lack of top-of-mind awareness, much less any experience with or understanding of what I’ll call new media marketing. By that I mean everything from organic SEO and PPC to the social marketing programs we’re working on with outreach to bloggers, drinks sites and social networking sites. It simply doesn’t come up in conversations either at Distil or the Wine Fair side of the show. And even when I mention it the response is something vague like, yeah…we sort of heard about that stuff.

And fuhgeddabout e-commerce!….lots of interest but no idea on how to or who to ask about it. We’ve got two very creative solutions we’re developing for those opportunities. And I’ll speak to both of them in future posts. Ta for now. Sphere: Related Content

Social Media Marketing: Working with Wikipedia

As we get more involved with social media, we've learned three very important things:
1) You have to play by the rules
2) You have to know the rules to play by them
3) The rules are always changing

Recognize that Wikipedia is a third party source. That means that it does NOT publish original information, only secondary information tha is referenced or validated by some other first party source. For our clients that means we need to get the trade press to publish what we would like included in Wikipedia and then we can reference it.

Wikipedia should not be looked at as a tool to generate links or traffic. ALL links on wikipedia are rel=”nofollow” meaning they are NOT counted as a link by Google or the other search engines which use links as part of their algorithm. No follow links are internal to the site they’re on.

There is a Wikiproject Food and Drink which is an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to articles on food and drink on Wikipedia. If you are interested in editing pages related , you need to visit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Food_and_drink where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion

Making Contributions to Wikipedia guidelines:
-Don’t write it yourself
-Don’t directly edit it yourself
-Don’t hide/be anonymous/or use a fake persona
-Start at the talk page, Introduce yourself and identify your affiliation on the talk page and ask for permission to do things
-Make your edits suggestions via the Talk page and let others do the posting

Newbie Mistakes
-Don’t use a promotional username (e.g. with your brand or company name in it)
-Copyright violations/fair use of photos
-Conflict of interest…don’t write about yourself
-Not clearly understanding what defines a neutral point of view.

Use the system to your benefit by following the rules and participating.
-Let your audience do the marketing
-Content spreads virally because of open copyrights
-Participating can build your reputation
-Things learned on Wikipedia can be applied elsewhere
-Become a part of community/forum, answer questions, interact with editor, donate images, report problems, building goodwill and obey social norms
-Do not badmouth competitors and withdraw from personal attacking.
-Only secondary knowledge can be posted (has to be published somewhere else before going on Wikipedia) and info has to be referenced
Sphere: Related Content