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Please Help Me Pick a New Look For My Blog

I’ve been making a few tweaks to Convince & Convert recently, with the help of my friend (and Wordpress/SEO ninja) Chuck Reynolds.

We’ve added Disqus as the commenting system. Changed the sharing tools to incorporate Sexy Bookmarks plug-in (Michael Stelzner at Social Media Examiner turned me on to it). We’re working on tweaking the subscription center at the top a bit, too.

But I need your help with the biggest change – the header.

I’m a big believer in humanization of your blog (in fact, it’s one of my 11 must-dos for serious bloggers). And while I have my photo on the right side of every page (I like the photo – by my friend Tyson Crosbie – do you?), I’d like a stronger visual identity overall. I’ve never loved the top header. A little too sterile, in my opinion.

So, I have three options below for consideration. I’d sure appreciate if you could vote in the poll, and if you have comments about particular elements of the designs, please do sound off. Thanks for your help!

(click to enlarge)

Option 1

Option 2

Option 3

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11 Mind-Blowing Reasons Your Company Needs Facebook

Wow. Remember when MySpace was the dominant social network? Seems like a long time ago, as the past three years have seen Facebook approach, catch, and blow past MySpace to become our preferred online hangout spot.

Now, new data released by Facebook and third party researchers show just how influential Facebook has become in our daily lives. Combined with several critical adjustments to how Facebook publishes “news” and intersects with other sites, the state of Facebook is mind-blowing. And important for business.

Here’s 11 things about Facebook that you need to know:

1. 350 Million Global Users, and Counting
Facebook announced recently that they had passed 350 million members, making Facebook the third-largest country in the world, if it was a country. (perhaps that’s their end-game, joining the UN and raising an army?)

2. 100 Million U.S. Users
Sure, Facebook is strong around-the-world (Canada has the highest penetration rate), but nearly 1/3 of all Facebookers are here in the U.S. You may have heard of a TV show called American Idol. On a good night, it averages 20 million viewers. Facebook has 100 million American members. Hmmm.

3. Average Facebook User Spends 55 Minutes Per Day
Nearly one hour per day, per user. That’s a lot of Facebook time. How can your company grab a bit of consumer attention? This data is based on Facebook’s own published stats, covered by Inside Facebook.

4. Nearly 80,000 sites using Facebook Connect
Connect is the Facebook initiative that has the greatest long-range impact. By integrating Facebook closely, sites are making our personal social graphs truly portable. Instead of having to go to Facebook and other sites to visit our friends, they travel with us online (and in our pockets via mobile devices), always there to provide advice or commentary. Even Yahoo! and MySpace are rolling out deep Facebook integrations.

This of course makes Facebook the central hub of not just social media, but the Web (which is why Google is scrambling to catch up after their competing Google Connect fell flat).

5. Facebook Fan Box Becoming Pervasive
Perhaps the least powerful, but most prevalent flavor of Facebook Connect is Facebook Fan Box, a simple tool for enabling your Web site visitors, YouTube video watchers, or email newsletter recipients to become a fan of your brand – without even having to go to Facebook.

6. Average Facebook User Has 130 Friends
Will Facebook users continue to add more friends at a rapid pace? It depends upon how they view their Facebook connections. 130 friends almost bumps up against Dunbar’s Number of 150 – the theoretical maximum number of actual friend relationships you can sustain, according to British scientist Robin Dunbar.

If Facebook continues to revolve around relationships that you actually possess in three-dimensions – people you “actually” know, then the addition of bunches of new friends may slow considerably. But, if Facebook makes the leap to tie people together more casually (like Twitter), average friend counts could rise dramatically.

7. Average Facebook User Fans 2 Pages per Month
If you think tons of your customers should become fans of your company’s Facebook page, you might want to recalibrate your expectations. The average Facebook user “fans” only 2 new pages per month. That’s not a lot , considering how many brands, causes, and organizations we come into contact with on a regular basis.

If you’re going to make growth of your Facebook fan base a key part of your social media strategy, you must create a clear rationale for why consumers should participate with you.

You also might consider a robust, organized approach for promoting your Facebook fan page.

8. Only 4% of Pages Have 10,000 or More Fans
If your Facebook fan page is a bit of a ghost town, you’re not alone. A fantastic study by Sysomos of 600,000 Facebook fan pages shows that only 4% of pages have 10,000 or more fans – and only .76% have 100,000 or more.

That’s why it is so critical to focus your Facebook strategy on activating the fans you have, not just collecting fans like baseball cards.

9. Wall Posts Don’t Impact Popularity
The Sysomos study also found very little correlation between how frequently the Facebook page admin posted to the wall, and total number of fans. However – and this is important – there is a strong correlation between amount of other content (notes, links, photos, videos) and number of fans.

Thus, if you want to grow your Facebook fan base, it is imperative that you move beyond simple Wall posts and add photos, videos, links and other content.

10. Customized News Feed
Facebook’s recent move to an algorithm-driven news feed means that just because someone is your fan, does not mean they will see your wall posts or status updates (true for both individuals, and brands). Instead, the default news feed is now comprised of content that Facebook thinks you’ll like, based on your interactions with content from that author in the past, and interactions by your friends with that content.

This puts a tremendous premium on posting engaging content that will get comments and likes and shares. If you’re not paying attention to your content engagement scores within your Facebook analytics, start doing so now, and testing content types to see what works best for your brand.

11. Real-time Search Changes the Game
Facebook is now making most content available publicly, unless you tell them not to via your privacy settings. Twitter opened their data stream to anyone (not just big developers). Google and Bing are incorporating this data into search results, in real-time.

This has tremendous implications for search engine optimization and reputation management, since a negative status update about your brand might now show up on the first page of Google search results for your company name (at least temporarily). The shakeout is still happening, but someone in your company needs to be on top of real-time search. Today.

Facebook may not be the ideal environment for every social media initiative, but its huge size forces you to at least consider participating – regardless of what type of business you run. Conversely, some brands are putting an awful lot of eggs in the Facebook basket, which is perhaps justifiable based on the facts above. However, I’m not keen on building the centerpiece of my social media strategy on what amounts to rented land.

Is your business taking advantage of Facebook? How important is it to your social media efforts? What advice do you have for creating content and managing Facebook fan pages?

(This post originally appeared on SocialMediaExaminer.com)

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The Chicken and the Egg Social Media Conundrum

There are many ways social media differs from traditional marketing. It’s approachable and human. It’s a two-way dialog, rather than unilateral declarations. It treats the customer as a teammate, rather than a target.

But there’s another big difference. In social media, the audience comes after the message, not before.

Remember that when you buy a print ad, or billboard, or print a direct mail piece, or buy radio time, or banner ads, or bus benches, or hire a skywriter, you are doing so because you have some idea of how many people will see your message, and that they are theoretically folks that give a whit about your company.

Social media is the exact opposite.

Hand-to-hand Combat for Eyeballs

You decide you want to join the conversation on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, your blog or wherever, and you start with an audience of zero. The audience accrues based on the quality and authenticity of your message.

Thus, there are really no shortcuts in social media. Sure, you can produce more content, or tweet about it with greater frequency, or be smarter about SEO, or craftily link your social outposts together. But all of those just make a good social media program better – they don’t guarantee you an audience.

And the more I think about it, the more I believe that’s why some marketers have trouble wrestling and conceptualizing social media. Our attention and loyalties are no longer for sale the way they historically have been. In social media, you can’t open up your Arbitron report and figure out which stations will reach your target audience, and write your check and be on drive time in a few days, distributing your message widely.

As Brian Solis puts it so well, we now earn the relationships, trust, and reputation we deserve.

There’s a lot of people out there trying to figure out how to game the system. How to find the secret social media loophole that enables you to grow an audience like a chia pet without having to work at it. I don’t think they’ll find their magic beans, and I hope you don’t let them keep trying.

Yes, it’s hard. Nobody ever promised social media was easy, just that it was fun, and effective. But, unlike every other marketing tool for the past 200 years, it’s a meritocracy, and that benefits us all.

I just started noodling this concept of audience coming after the message the other day. Will you help me think it through in the comments?

(photo by nukeit1)

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Is Your Company More Interesting Than My Wife?

If you’re going to succeed on Facebook, you don’t just have to be more interesting than other companies, you have to be more interesting than my friends and relatives. Are you prepared for that?

My friend Jeff Widman runs BrandGlue, a consultancy that helps companies better manage their Facebook fan pages. He told me recently that since Facebook rolled out the news feed changes (they decide what gets shown on your news feed based on what you’ve “liked” and commented upon in the past, and what your friends have “liked” and commented upon), that only 2 out of every 1000 Facebook updates will show up in your news feed.

2 out of 1000. It’s like playing the content lottery.

That 1000 is comprised of updates from every person with whom I am friends, and every page or group of which I am a fan. My mom. My wife. My brother. My best friends. Clients. Former coworkers. And about 75 brand fan pages (in my case).

So, if you are Jason Falls’ Social Media Explorer (a brand of which I am a fan on Facebook) you have to get me to engage with your updates as often or more often than I engage with the updates from everyone else.

Thus, the absolute key to Facebook success is creating status updates that encourage or demand interaction. Here’s an example of content from from my friend, the utterly fabulous social buzz-builder Amy Martin at Digital Royalty, that is not optimized to compete for my attention:

Here’s how that same message could be tweaked to “win” likes or comments from me, and thus have a greater chance of showing up in my news feed – and thus the news feeds of my friends.

- First, the message could have been shown to only people in Baltimore.
- Assuming that is too narrow of an audience, I might suggest writing it this way:

“Who do you know in Baltimore or the Northeast that’s into sports and social media? Digital Royalty is co-hosting an event at ESPN Zone to tie in with National Sports Forum (link). Who should we invite?”

Positioning the content as a question and a request for help will solicit likes and comments that will push the update into the news feeds of many, many more people.

It’s also critical to recognize that since Facebook added the “share” functionality just a couple weeks ago, that this button only appears adjacent to links, photos, or videos. (You’ll notice the “share” link in the Digital Royalty post above, because there’s a link to the event details in the post). If you just post a regular text status message, “share” doesn’t show up, making it substantially more difficult for your fans to spread your content on your behalf. Thus, Facebook has essentially said that photos, videos and links are preferable to text-only status updates.

In many ways, Facebook fan pages are post-modern email newsletters. Keeping your customers up-to-date and keeping your brand top-of-mind. You’re fighting it out for our attention every time you add content, and multi-media is better than text.

Are you thinking about that, or are you just posting?

(photo by jimmy_macdonald)

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Take Off the Social Media Blindfold

Among the many exceptionally interesting data snacks in the recent MarketingProfs’ State of Social Media report is one showing that businesses of all sizes and types are primarily using Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin, YouTube, and blogging.

And while it’s on one hand a positive that we’re stating to see some norms and best practices emerge within social media, it’s a tremendous mistake to restrict your social media activities to just the “Big Five.”

There are literally hundreds of other places your customers could be talking about your brand within the social Web, and it’s imperative that you hear all of them. If a subset (even a small one) of your customer base loves Tripadvisor, or Yelp, or FriendFeed, or their Ning group or whatever, that does not make them less important to your brand’s perception than people on Twitter or Facebook, it just makes them a different segment of your audience.

Remember, there is a REASON they spend their time within the social ecosystem on Yelp and not Facebook – because that’s the community they PREFER. And in fact, people that make choices that are less conventional tend to defend those choices more passionately than the “me too” crowd. And, because there are fewer total users, the opinions of any individual are magnified.

Further, regardless of where the content is posted, it will be found and indexed by search engines, becoming part of your brand’s permanent record, like that crappy tattoo of a hummingbird you got in Cancun.

Dear Marriott: Pay Attention

Consider this horrifying example for Marriott. I did a quick check of Google Sidewiki (a plug-in for Firefox and Internet Explorer that lets you comment on Web pages, and those comments are “stuck” the Web page like a Post-It note). I found this solitary post, ripping Marriott for not removing this guy from their email newsletter list. I’m not sure what’s worse, the company not paying attention to secondary and tertiary layers of the social Web and thus not finding this, or knowing about it and not leaving a reply. Either way, their silence is deafening.

Do millions of people use Sidewiki? Not yet, but since it’s a Google project, there’s a fair chance it will take off. And for the people that are already using Sidewiki, doesn’t this impact how you perceive Marriott? And now I’ve shared it with all of you, so a comment on a “minor” social outpost continues to fester, unabated.

I realize it’s a hassle to monitor your brand across all of these places. It takes time. Time you probably don’t have. But you know how municipal police forces crush graffiti problems? They paint over it immediately, wherever it occurs. It’s a lesson that applies equally in social media.

The days of “if we answer back, it just gives them credence” are over. Take off the blinders, remove the earplugs, and defend yourself.

(disclaimer: MarketingProfs is a Convince & Convert client. You might want to read another post that references their data: Crushing the Myth of B2B Social Media)

(for more on Google Sidewiki, read this excellent post by Jeremiah Owyang)

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US Speedskating Finds Fans In Social Media

Did you know the United States Speedskating team has won 75 Olympic medals, making it the most successful U.S. winter Olympics sport?

But the global economic bear doesn’t take medal count into consideration, and last year the speedskating team was without a title sponsor when Dutch bank DSB went bankrupt. (Why a U.S. bank didn’t sponsor the U.S. team is a mystery to me).

Into the breech stepped comedian Stephen Colbert, whose Colbert Nation is now sponsoring the team (in a wacky case of real people sponsoring real people through the conduit of a fictional character). However, the sponsorship only runs through February’s Vancouver Olympics, after which the team will be sponsorless once more. Gold level sponsorship is $300,000 a year for four years, which seems like a pittance in the sponsorship industry?

With the assistance of their agency Flint Group, the U.S. Speedskating team is using social media to connect with a new generation of fans, making sponsorship more attractive to potential partners. (disclosure: Flint Group is a Convince & Convert client)

Facebook As Home Base

I’ve written before about the potential of using Facebook as your social media home base, and in this instance U.S. Speedskating is doing exactly that. Facebook is more interactive and easier to update than the U.S. Speedskating Web site, and with 3-4 posts per day, and many of them photos or videos, the team is keeping fans engaged on Facebook. Wisely, they are trying to tie into the Colbert program as much as possible, without shifting the focus away from the athletes. Their recent Facebook program of having fans send in photos of themselves wearing their Colbert Nation caps is an example of this integrated approach.

You’d like to see more fans of the page (~1,200 as I write this), but I suspect interest will pick up as the Olympics near, and the program matures (the entire social media effort is fewer than 30 days old). They are also posting on related Facebook pages, especially those devoted to broader Olympics coverage, to make sure speedskating fans know the new team page is out there. This is good tactic that is often overlooked. As long as you don’t get spammy, posting on other Facebook pages about your page is perfectly legitimate. Just remember to keep it relevant. If it feels to you like it might be a little over the line, it IS.

Shine the Light on Others, and It Shines Back on You

I also like the way the team is highlighting bloggers. Using a custom Facebook tab called “Featured Bloggers” they are promoting blogs devoted to skating that have covered the team (as well as Colbert’s blog). It’s a good example of using their social graph to boost the social graph of bloggers that cover them. Smart.

Listen and Engage

While Facebook is the core, the team is also interacting with fans (and potential fans) in the wild, with a social media listening program that used an Olympics ticket giveaway as a rationale for interacting. (if you donated to the team, you were entered to win tickets).


Agency personnel are also commenting on blogs, providing contextually appropriate links to the Facebook home base. Note that Flint Group is not pretending to BE U.S. Speedskating, but appropriately says in the blog comment that they are helping with social media. A best practice.

Telling Stories With Video

As you might expect, there are some intriguing stories surrounding the team, including Simon Cho who came to the U.S. as an undocumented immigrant from Korea; Allison Baver, who shattered her leg in an accident last year; and of course Apolo Ohno, the most well-known U.S. speedskater, and Dancing with the Stars alum.

Most of these stories are being told via video, with a YouTube channel that’s cross-posted to Facebook. The team is trying to find the budget to send members of the Flint Group to Vancouver to live-blog and video blog the speedskating events, as well as produce live Facebook and Twitter updates.

Like Herding Cats Wearing Skates

The two biggest challenges seem to be not getting overwhelmed by Stephen Colbert, and operating a social media program where you have very little ability to manage the participants.

Corporate marketers, does this sound familiar?

The speedskating team has many strong personalities, almost all of whom have their own Web sites and social media outreach. Plus, creating social media content isn’t paramount in the minds of the athletes these days…something about having to train for the Olympics…

As with many companies where team members have their own personal brands, the U.S. Speedskating team has to work to integrate multiple outposts under an umbrella, while consistently making the case that supporting the team’s unified social efforts is as valuable as individual initiatives. The agency has built and distributed content creation guidelines to the skaters to help consistency.

So far, so good. While this integrated social media program doesn’t have a ton of eyeballs on it yet, I think they’re executing wisely.

What do you think?

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Should a Blog be Your Social Media Hub?

The divine corporate blogging expert Debbie Weil recently asked this question on her blog, as part of a Kindle version refresh of her excellent book “The Corporate Blogging Book.”

Debbie asked me to think about whether a blog should be the social media hub – your epicenter, the place where you’re trying to bring your customers and prospects. Based largely on the comment I left on her blog, here’s what I think. What about you?

Should a blog be the hub of your social media efforts?

It depends on the objectives the company has for its social media efforts.

Maybe Facebook Is Your Hub?

If the objective is to interact with current customers, keeping your product or service top -of-mind and building kinship with the brand, Facebook may in fact be the best hub, given its inherent sociability, ease-of-use, and large audience. However, I’m always troubled by companies putting too much emphasis on Facebook (New England Patriots, Vitamin Water and many others are favoring Facebook over their corporate Web sites/blogs). Do you really want to build your social media program on what amounts to rented land? One terms of service change and your social media program has to scramble.

Maybe a Private Community is Your Hub?

If your social media efforts tilt toward customer service and market research, a private brand community might be the true hub. Something like Communispace or My Starbucks Idea. This is where you might have the best engagement and insight flow. But, these are typically tip of the iceberg communities from a numbers standpoint, and may not have the breadth to really be considered the “hub”.

Paul Gillin (whose blog is excellent) mentioned in the comments that he viewed Twitter as a satellite opportunity, not a hub per se.  I agree. I see Twitter as a complementary tool for all the others – with the possible exception of a focused customer support program like @comcastcares or @twelpforce where Twitter is really a post-modern 800 number that has freestanding benefit to the company and its customers.

Yeah, Probably Your Blog

Generally, I do believe a blog is the best hub for most social media efforts. First, because blogs can be significantly more social than most corporate Web sites. Second, because blogs are typically not burdened with all the product info, support info, background info and other semi-useful pages that corporate Web sites need to support that mostly just get in the way. Think of a Christmas tree that didn’t include the crappy ornaments that you got from your parents but feel obligated to hang, but only displays cool ornaments you bought from yourself, or that your kids made. That’s the navigational and information architecture advantage of a blog.

Not to mention that blogs are far superior to corporate Web sites, Facebook pages, and Twitter accounts with regard to inbound marketing. If your social media objective is even tangentially about attracting new customers, the SEO value of the blog alone makes it a suitable hub.

Lastly, the longer-form nature of blogging makes it ideal for developing connections between the company and customers. There is only so much humanization you can do in 140 characters – even in somewhat longer Facebook posts. Sure, you need to have a variety of social media presences to accommodate the usage patterns of your customers and fans. (Great interview here with Steve Rubel about that). But, unlike Rubel I believe you have to have a nucleus for your social media strategy that the other outposts orbit.

All good companies are made up of great people. Social media lets you prove it, and blogs are still the best way to do so. Right?

(photo by yumyumbubblegum)

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4 Ways Bloggers Differ From Reporters

You have to pitch bloggers differently than reporters. The marvelous Dave Fleet writes a lot about this topic, and Chris Brogan produced a terrific, straightforward post about blogger pitching recently.

Here’s my thoughts on some advanced blogger pitching ideas and the key differences between bloggers and reporters.

Influence is Made Not Born

Guess how many readers this blog had originally?

If you guessed zero, you’re right. Help yourself to some free social media tools. Seriously, I had to convince my Mom to read Convince & Convert, and my wife still doesn’t tune in.

And the truth is that every blog started the same way. Brogan. Mashable. MarketingProfs. Solis. All of them started with zero readers, and now are influential (at least in the context of our own little marketing/PR/social media world).

Doing It My Way

The fact that bloggers all have to climb this mountain is an important difference between bloggers and journalists. Remember that bloggers’ influence is derived from their own ability and moxie, whereas journalists’ influence is in large measure derived via the outlet they represent. If you’re a writer for the Washington Post, you have influence. But if one day you aren’t, your influence transfers to the guy sitting at your old desk. For all but the celebrity journalists, influence is as portable as health care – not at all.

And unlike the journalists, writing is usually not a full-time job for most bloggers. Thus, bloggers are typically inveterate multi-taskers that protect their time like a pissed off goose with a nest full of goslings.

That’s why bloggers get so irked about ham-handed pitches from clueless PR folks that are still in the “harvest email address and send bulk releases” school of outreach. It wastes time, which is a commodity that’s in short supply for bloggers – who don’t have any readers unless they make it happen.

The Influence Economy

Most bloggers are not compensated directly for their writing. Sure, they may have some ads or affiliate links on the site (although I personally abhor it), but unless the blog gets serious traffic, the ability to monetize eyeballs is limited, indeed.

By way of example, let’s take a look at this very blog. I’m on track to generate 30,000 page views in January, which would be a record (sincere thanks to every single one of you, even Mom). Setting aside affiliate or Google Adwords opportunities, and working strictly with conventional online advertising economics, the max I could make on this blog monthly from your eyeballs is about $450. (30,000 page views X 3 ads per page X $5 per thousand ad impressions). I spend about 8 hours per week on this blog between writing, commenting, tweaking, etc. – and that’s a lot less than some of my peers. But for me, my hourly take for blogging would be $14.

That’s why I don’t blog for money per se, nor do most other bloggers. But blogging is incredibly important to my business because it generates social media speaker opportunities, and social media consulting projects. Thus, every reader of this blog is a potential client, or a connection to a potential client – as well as a potential colleague, friend, drinking buddy or fantasy football league-mate.

So even though I’m not in the advertising business, traffic absolutely matters to me, as it does to all bloggers.

There are two currencies that matter to bloggers – traffic and influence. When you’re pitching bloggers, find a way for your interaction with them to generate one of those two things (or both), and you’ll have yourself quite an effective pitch.

What generates traffic and influence for bloggers? Access and information. Don’t just send a blogger a write-up of your nifty marketing program. Give the blogger access to your metrics and ask if they’d like to create a post analyzing your ROI. Provide an interview with the customers that participated in the program. Link to the bloggers’ post from your corporate Web site.

It’s not about exclusives and embargoes. It’s not about doing all the work FOR the reporter, so he or she can hit a deadline with minimal effort. With bloggers, it’s about co-creating the content WITH the blogger, helping he or she package the content in a way that’s unusual, memorable and impactful. That’s what drives traffic, and that’s what drives influence.

Recap of the 4 Main Differences Between Reporters and Bloggers

  • Bloggers are self-made
  • Bloggers are time-starved
  • Bloggers need traffic and influence
  • Bloggers want to co-create content with you

What other differences do you see?

(photo by BitchBuzz)

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HARO Gets Serious About Crowd Sourced Journalism

Help A Reporter Out (HARO), the uber-simple brainchild of hyper-active, skydiving, PR wild child Peter Shankman has gone big-time.

Born humbly as a simple way for reporters to connect with potential sources, HARO has grown to more than 50,000 participating reporters, with 150,000 people receiving three daily emails stuffed with requests for sources.

Not surprisingly, HARO started groaning at the seams a while ago, as the sheer volume of reporter requests in each email made it virtually impossible to scan. Evidently, there was a four month wait to advertise in the HARO email, too (which reportedly gets a mind boggling 75%+ open rate).

My old friend Thom Brodeur joined HARO a few months ago as COO, promising to take the operation to new heights. And with the release today of the new HARO 1.0, it looks like they’re on their way. (Interview of Thom by Deirdre Breakenridge here)

Personalization and Relevancy

If you’re a masochist, or a PR person that has clients in a ton of different industries, you can continue to receive the full version of the HARO emails. But most people will very much appreciate the ability to receive industry-specific versions containing inquiries germane only to their area of expertise.

This should make each edition of HARO much shorter and easier to browse, saving time and increasing relevancy dramatically.

Go to the nifty new Web site and create an account to set your customization options.

Now Spam Free

Taking a page from Craig’s List, HARO is now anonymizing reporters’ email addresses, so they cannot be spammed by unscrupulous types that were deploying harvesting scripts to surreptitiously gather all the email addresses. That should increase journalists’ confidence in HARO, and boost participation even more.

The one negative consequence is that in addition to hiding emails, HARO is now hiding publications. Thus, you don’t know if the reporter is from the Wall Street Journal or Reptile Hobbyist, and I know most PR folks would change their pitch and their time allocation based on which media outlet the reporter represents. (Peter Shankman posted in the comments that this was a glitch, not a feature, and has been corrected)

(Note that HARO has a Get Satisfaction customer support community where you can sound off on all elements of the new HARO that you love, like, or loathe)

On a Scale of 1-10, Your Pitch is a 11

HARO is trying to move much of the interaction between reporters and sources away from ad hoc emails, toward a Web-based protocol. This creates less email volume for reporters, and gives HARO the ability to better track results.

While this takes a bit more effort because you have to go to the site and log-in, it’s advantageous for both reporter and source because HARO is storing your previous queries and pitches. Thus, you can log-in and see all the reporters you’ve contacted.

For journalists, the news is even better, as they can now store their favorite HARO sources on the site, and can rate pitches in real-time. Thus, if you pitch a reporter via HARO, and your pitch was off-base, the reporter can give you a virtual thumbs up or down, and some sense of where you went astray.

Hopefully, reporters will use this feature, because as HARO has grown the number of pitches you send that get no response whatsoever from reporters has increased – and that’s frustrating.

While you lose a bit of the transparency and ease-of-use that were hallmarks of the original, organic HARO, this new version has much-need personalization and account management functionality that should enable this indispensable, post-modern journalism bazaar humming for a while.

What do you think of the new HARO? How much do you use it?

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Attacking the Social Media Lynch Mob

Can we put down the pitchforks?

For most of the past year, there’s been a barrage of blog posts bemoaning the social media gold rush, and the number of self-proclaimed experts that seem to propagate like pink eye in a kindergarten class.

In fact, there was much hand-wringing a couple weeks ago when Mashable breathlessly announced that there were 15,000+ people on Twitter that professed to be some sort of social media consultant in their bio.

“They don’t know what they are doing. They are just selling snake oil!” is the typical complaint. To which I say, so what?

I believe I can help companies and agencies with social media, and it’s of course gratifying that other people seem to think I know what I’m doing enough to hire me, book me to speak and so forth.

But, who am I, who are you, or who is anybody to paint someone else with the “snake oil salesman” brush? Just because someone takes a more tactical approach to social media, just because they don’t measure ROI the way you do, just because they focus on small business and you don’t, does not mean they are charlatans.

Suckiness Doesn’t Equal Robbery

Even if they aren’t particularly good at social media, it doesn’t give you the right to call them a phony or an opportunist. I’ve hired plenty of crappy accountants, lawyers, landscapers, roofers, etc. but I certainly don’t consider them to be snake oil salesmen, just less good at their profession than I would have preferred.

Let’s remember that the commercial Web is really only 15 years old. Best practices on components as old school as Web sites, email and SEO aren’t fully established, much less social media.

And that’s the issue I have with this debate. Do I think companies should have a comprehensive social media strategy that’s multi-faceted and thoughtful? Of course. But, not every company is ready for that. So if there are consultants out there that want to help companies do just one part of social media – like set up and manage a Twitter account – is that snake oil or is that an appropriately striated marketplace?

And this notion that you can’t be good at social media unless you’ve been doing it for years is utter crap. Talent and ability does not have a born on or expiration date, and to bray that your wisdom automatically sets you apart sounds like French nobility when the guillotine is being sharpened. `

Different Isn’t Inherently Wrong

Will some companies have poor experiences with social media consultants that are inexperienced or purely tactical in their thinking? Of course. The same way people have poor experiences with Web designers, chiropractors, and chimney sweeps. But that doesn’t mean the client got robbed, it just means they’ll come to better understand the difference between okay and excellent. McDonald’s doesn’t make the best burger. SuperCuts doesn’t provide the best coiffe.

When I owned a Web design and online marketing agency, the vast majority of our work came from companies that had a less than ideal relationship with a prior vendor. The result wasn’t that they abandoned the medium, the result was that they made a more thoughtful choice of partner the next time.

And that’s what will happen here. People that aren’t very good at social media consulting won’t be successful, and that will generate more (not less) business for those who are effective providers of social media ideas and counsel.

Cream always rises. Until it does, my advice is to play your own game and quit worrying about the presumed inadequacies of others trying to make a living in social media. There’s plenty of cookies in the jar.

Remember that in social media, everyone’s a teacher and everyone’s a student.

(photo by Robert Couse-Baker)

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