GETTING PERSONAL ALERT!
Back in your box Darika
Back in your box Darika
The Background
I don’t normally blog and talk about “feelings”, this has always been a blog that’s professional and not personal in nature, but damn it, this week it got personal.
As you know I was involved with the Social Collective Conference. First off, I want to say that I don’t generally support paid-for Social Media conferences, but having already agreed to join Shannon at the event I threw my heart and soul into trying to give value at the event.
I’m not just saying that. I really did. I felt a huge personal responsibility to show value to each and every attendee. I turned up at 9am and stayed until the very end to ensure the event and speakers got my full support. I didn’t just swan in, grand stand, then swan out.
SoTech Now
Well it’s been a whirlwind journey since I got to know Paul Armstrong (@munkyfonkey) and Shannon Eastman (@shannoneastman) at the start of the year.
Shannon, bless her, signed up Paul and I to present at Social Collective 2010 and we thought we were going to get up there and talk about social media marketing. So far, so like every other conference.
But the more we spoke, the more we realised we were narked about the same things in the industry:
- We were tired of talking about Social Media just in marketing circles
- We didn’t care about the latest new tech brand, we were more interested in what it could do
- We thought business was still business, if social technologies aren’t MAKING or SAVING money then why are you using them? (Exc third sector from biz objectives here)
The last point we knew social media could deliver on – if the right stakeholders, with the right objectives, used the right tools. Our solution? An infographic 
You can find the SoTech Infographic over on a dedicated home we’ve set up called SoTechNow.com
This is the change in conversation we want to make. We’re hoping to keep updating the site and the infographic is only V1.0 right now so yes please, we’re very much looking for feedback on how to make this even more useful for business.
What do you reckon? Do you think we need to move on from talking about social media and start foccussing on analysing/benchmarking/creating case studies around social technologies instead?
Blogger Outreach: Stuart Waterman
The problem with being a blog “influential”
Writer, editor, and one-time Social Media Manager, Stuart Waterman runs music blog My Chemical Toilet. The blog frequently makes it on to “top music influencer” lists in PR circles, yet unfortunately that means many PRs don’t bother to read the site at all. Just 5 mins quality time spent reading My Chemical Toilet would show that the blog has a very clear style and you can’t just pitch in any old music related stuff. Here he takes time out from writing about Naughty Rappers to tell us about PR/Blogger Outreach.
Stuart Waterman
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes.
2. Should they?
Well I do say how they can contact me in my “About” section, so I can’t complain really.
How to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing
While everyone’s running around trying to work out how to join up their online with their offline marketing I just want to see marketing which works.
Marketers have lost their way. If you really want to achieve excellence in joined-up marketing it’s probably not what you think.
[Special mention has to go to my compadres Paul Armstrong & Shannon Eastman who help me in joined-up thinking and will be debating these ideas later in the month at Social Collective 2010.]
.Excellence in marketing isn't about a joined-up strategy, it's about marketing which works. Marketing ROI is not a metric, it's a business result.”]
Joining online with offline marketing: back to basics
The key to joining the channels is to first go back to Marketing 101 basics: who is your customer?
And I don’t mean the lazy “our product could sell to everyone! Teens! Grandparents! Men! Women! All over the globe!“. That’s all well and good but the secret to success of brands like Apple is you know EXACTLY who the iPad is aimed for, right? When Starbucks first opened you know EXACTLY the sort of clientele they wanted to attract (and it wasn’t the mothers with buggies and/or crazy people wanting to use the toilet types you see today).
The biggest brands narrow focus and go after a certain customer. This doesn’t prevent other people from buying their products or services, it just helps them market to a core consumer. Offline marketing isn’t dead, ‘spray and pray’ is.
When you know who your customer is, it’s easy to create a marketing strategy. Online and offline become irrelevant, you’ve just got to market to them in places they hang out.
offline marketing channels and then dump a small proportion of their budget on online marketing – to "test if it works".This seems to ignore the facts, for example social networking alone now accounts for nearly a quarter of all time spent on the Internet, and these figures can only grow. If your customer is aged 15 – 24 then for the love of god, throw the traditional marketing plan out the window, they're not reading newspapers!Joined-up marketing should take the budget as a whole and allocate spend to the channels most likely to target your customer, irrelevant of whether they're online or offline.As for testing if it works, I find it a hell of a lot easier to track if someone clicked through from a Facebook page to buy something on my website than follow someone home after handing them a free chocolate bar. [Disclaimer: I have never knowingly followed someone home after giving them a free chocolate bar.]“]
Measuring the excellence of your joined-up marketing
So you’ve profiled your customer, you’ve picked your marketing channels, you’ve allocated your budget cleverly across online and offline, what do you tell the boss?
Well, what is the boss telling YOU – is the business making money? It astounds me the lack of business critical data marketers use to inform their marketing decisions.
Is the product selling? If so, to whom (and was it who you thought your customer was)? Where are people buying from? Is anyone tracking any of this stuff in the business?
Many bosses will be happy with what I call ‘Ego Marketing’ i.e. “Check out this super awesome full page wrap around which will be in the hands of every commuter for the whole of today.” But most will settle for making money.
If your marketing strategy is doing that, then you’ve achieved excellence in joined-up marketing. Relax, put your feet up, enjoy that free chocolate bar the attractive young actress outside the tube gave you this morning.
This post is part of the #JUMPchallenge, a blogging competition designed to raise awareness of how to join up online and offline marketing, launched to support Econsultancy’s JUMP event.
[Images: apdk, Nina Matthews Photography, striatic, Horia Varlan]
Blogger Outreach: Gemma Cartwright
Don’t be afraid…
Gemma Cartwright started blogging when she was in 16. She joined Shiny Media [R.I.P.] in 2004 to launch their first fashion site Shoewawa.com, going on to become Group Editor of the Shiny fashion network. She’s written about celebrities for The Nod, happy homelife at Domestic Sluttery, geek chic for Dork Adore, and a host of on- and off-line media.
Last year she founded Big Girls Browse, a site aimed at anyone who finds it hard to shop to suite their shape, and has already attracted interest from most of the High St brands including a guest spot editing the Evans blog.
Gemma Cartwright
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes.
2. Should they?
Absolutely. I really don’t mind receiving press releases, email pitches, celeb style IDs, event invitations…anything really. I’m not bothered by a bulging inbox, I can easily delete the stuff I don’t need. That said, I do get a lot of badly-targeted stuff from PRs in the US and my requests to be removed from their lists go unnoticed. If I went to all the events in NY that I’m invited to, I’d have an astounding amount of airmiles!
Blogger Outreach: Amber McNaught
How wrong can PRs get it?
Aside from battling issues of gingerism and the fact people frequently steal her image to use as their own profile pic, she deals with a lot of crazy PR. She spills all below (names changed to protect the guilty)
Amber McNaught
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes! Sometimes dozens and dozens per day (or hour…)
2. Should they?
Yes, absolutely: I’m always happy to hear about anything that might potentially be of interest to my readers, as long as it’s relevant to my sites.
Blogger Outreach: Katherine Hannaford
Not all bloggers hate PRs, right?
Katherine Hannaford is the UK Contributing Editor of Gizmodo. Having cut her teeth as Editor of Tech Digest she then went on to work as News Editor at T3.com before landing a job with one of the world’s leading technology sites. Consequently Kat has experienced many a Tech PR’s first fumblings in outreach – is she a blogger? journalist? professional writer?
Over the years Kat and I have debated and taken different sides over PR/Blogger frictions. She’s recently emerged though as a vocal supporter that the Twitter name-and-shame culture is tired & unbalanced.
Katherine Hannaford
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, either by email, phone, or snail-mail.
2. Should they?
I’d rather receive all press releases, however irrelevant they may be, rather than receive less and run the risk of missing out on a story. It takes a millisecond to delete a release, but admittedly I do get frustrated with some agencies who just spam me several times a week with clients’ releases that we’d never even dream of writing up. I do wish they’d bother checking our site for the type of content we cover.
Blogger Outreach: Paul Armstrong
Do any PRs really get this blogger outreach stuff?
P
aul Armstrong is… a PR! Now you’ve recovered from the shock here’s his Blogger chops: He was recently nominated as one of the Top 10 most influential people in the digital industry by PR Week (meaning he gets put on loads of “influencer” lists), and has written for Businessweek, Penthouse [Paul, WTF???], Saturday Night Magazine, BPM, Celebuzz, Lost In A Supermarket and Instinct. He currently writes for Wired UK, Le Branche and PR Week and is the guy behind the crazy successful @mediaisdying Twitter account.
Even though Paul is the Digital Director at Kindred he still receives some appalling “blogger outreach”. I asked him to share his thoughts.
Paul Armstrong
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes
2. Should they?
Sure – I don’t say I’ll get back to them or rely on them so I think all’s fair! Looking for betas, new features, the usual stuff – if for mag stuff – high end design, lux, tech/gadgets.
Blogger Outreach: Sian Meades
Why are we still talking about Blogger Outreach?
Yep, this topic is completely over discussed in online PR circles but we, as an industry, are still doing a horrific job at maintaining any sort of good relations with those who write online.
Nothing illustrated this more to me than seeing even Gary Andrews driven to despair last month [PR's Own Goal]. But when I talk to many PRs they simply just don’t believe how badly and how frequently bloggers are being contacted – making us all, quite frankly, look like numpties.
The #fixPR series tries to give the good with the bad, the fix with the gripe, and I’ve come up with a novel way of doing this. I’ve asked some of my favourite bloggers, in their own words, to tell you about blogger outreach from a blogger’s point of view. This will be a series over the next couple of weeks and they all make FASCINATING reading.
First up is…
Sian Meades
Sian Meades is the founder and editor of interiors and lifestyle website Domestic Sluttery and the new fashion blog A Change of A Dress. Not just content with owning the prettiest corner of the web she also writes for Europe a la Carte, Venere.com and Lastminute.com and has previously written for AOL’s personal finance site Wallet Pop.
As you can imagine the sheer number and range of site Sian’s involved with make for quite the Inbox. Over to Sian.
1. Do PRs contact you regarding your site?
Yes, I probably get about 30-50 emails a day from PRs.
2. Should they?
Yep, we welcome the contact and need to know about new (relevant) products and Cool Things. Sometimes it’s mass mailouts (often skimmed through) other times it’s something targeted. I’m not fussed about either, but I’m more likely to pay attention to the latter.
Life Dorkage
Just when you thought my unbearable rants on using social media for marketing couldn’t get any dorkier …then along comes Katie Lee of Miramus, publisher of Dork Adore, and recent Cosmo Blog Awards Nominee (please vote!) inviting me to contribute some posts to the Life Dorkage section of this much beloved tech site.
Yes it’s true, it’s not just marketing, I synch my life with the web.
Here’s some excerpts from my latest posts:
Best tools for Getting Things Done. Pt I: Work
When it comes to Getting Things Done, Darika Ahrens is the woman you turn to. Not only is she the High Priestess of Social Media in the UK, she’s also a great big lifehack nerd. If there’s a tool out there for making life easier, Darika has already signed up, logged in, and taken the “Darika” username.
We asked her to teach us how to be better humans. She kindly obliged.
BEST TOOLS FOR GETTING THINGS DONE….AT WORK:
- Dropbox for filesharing
- Mindmeister for planning
- Milestone Planner for project management
Best tools for Getting Things Done. Pt II: Life
So, the social media marvel that is Darika Ahrens already shared her tools for Getting Things Done in her Work. Now, it’s time for her to tell us how to run our private lives more effectively as well.
BEST TOOLS FOR GETTING THINGS DONE…IN MY LIFE:
About:
I'm Darika Ahrens and I help brands develop marketing strategies for Social Media. My background is in Public Relations for companies like Orange, Microsoft, Philips, HTC, Yell.com, and Estee Lauder. I've worked with and trained some of the UK's top agencies.