2007 July 24 - AgencyNext, Inc. - Social Media Consultants - Proven PR Services for the New Media Era

Archive for July 24th, 2007

Kentucky Newspaper Kind of Misses the Point

July 24th, 2007 by Sterling Hager

OK, on one hand, I suppose this is positive news. A small town newspaper in Kentucky has gotten the social media bug and is now offering an online community site I guess. Trouble is, when you go there you have to subscribe to see it. I don't know about you, but I'm reluctant these days to sign up for anything. I don't want to be bothered, and I don't want to be bothered if you know what I mean.

No time today to write long (applause being heard in the background). Here's the news item announcing this breakthrough. Thanks to Lauren Bell of DM News.

I thought this was a funny line in the report:

“We wanted the social-networking portion to be there because we wanted to be on the ground floor of what we saw was an emerging trend in the industry,” said Dan Stahl, Web publisher for the Kentucky New Era.

The ground floor of an emerging trend?

Here's a link to the newspaper online.

How are brands performing within social media?

July 24th, 2007 by Sterling Hager

Here’s an interesting study from Immediate Future which attempts to calculate social media rankings for different brands by comparing each brand's "share of voice ranking".

I was intrigued by this study because it further validates that the rise of social media is not only changing the relationship between brand and audience, it is affecting the traditional marketing and PR metrics. As a PR professional, it’s nice to know that social media offers insights and understanding about your audience that has never before been achievable.

Check out this page of the study which shows that seven out of the top ten performing brands are technology companies.

Companies wanting to understand the conversation around their own brand must go further than measure share of voice and sentiment. They must delve deeper and isolate the buzz compared to influence. Influence not only plays an important role as a way of converting buzz to impact, it is also crucial to get a correct impression of the sentiment surrounding a topic or brand…social media conversation is not only about the numbers. Social media in itself has influence.

Crawl-Mart: Retailer Finally Gets It

July 24th, 2007 by Sterling Hager

Matthew Creamer at Advertising Age is reporting today that Wal-Mart has finally figured something out: The road to online retail dominance… is paved with customer content.

Proving once again that the biggest isn't necessarily the best, the fastest, or the most innovative… but that even big, slow, lumbering giants can eventually learn how to remain competitive: The company's announcement that it's allowing consumers to review and rate products on its website is a big, if belated, push by the stodgy giant into the social web, following scores of other retailers who have realized the power of crowdsourcing and co-creation.

How does this work? Can it work for you?

The reviews give Wal-Mart thousands of additional pages of content to be indexed by major search engines, which look favorably on unique content, such as reviews, compared with pages with basic product details that any retailer could have.

If you have a static web site brimming with boring, polished copy that rarely changes and no one wants to read very often, adding social media components can vastly improve your search engine ranking and results. But you have to want to take a risk… you have to let ordinary people have more or less unrestricted access to participate in the conversation. But hey, if Wal-Mart can do it, you can do it, too.