Serengeti Communications is hosting a dinner featuring Charlene Li as the guest speaker during SES San Jose this year and you can have an opportunity to win 1 of 2 seats we are giving away for the dinner.

What’s the catch?

Well, we’re looking for two companies who manage the most vendors to help them get their online marketing strategies accomplished.  So if you have one company to do your PPC, another for SEO, someone else to handle your online PR and yet another company to do Social Media or Analytics, we want to hear from you!  The form is really simple to fill out, we just want to know how many vendors you work with and for what (not who they are).  We’re curious as to the average number of vendors that one company has to deal with to handle their online marketing initiatives.

The two companies with the most vendors will be our winners.  If there are several companies who have the same number, we’ll put them into a fishbowl and have a drawing.  We’ll be announcing the winners on Friday August 7th, so spread the word!  If you are coming to San Jose for Search Engine Strategies or even live in the area and run your business from around San Jose, let us know about how you manage your online marketing strategies!

Win A Seat at a Private Dinner Featuring Charlene Li

One of the biggest misnomers in social media, and attempting to market to communities in social media, is that it’s entirely free. This notion comes from the “free” price tag that goes along with signing up for accounts on sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. It doesn’t cost you one cent from your bank account to open a basic account on these sites.

There are costs involved when you are considering entering into the social media space; the kind of costs that you don’t immediately pull out of your wallet to pay for. Since these costs are not immediate, the illusion that marketing efforts in social media cost less becomes even greater for companies looking for cheaper solutions to reaching their audiences.

Your Employees’ Time is Valuable

What a lot of companies neglect to figure into the larger picture is how much it costs them in time and resources of employees, tools and equipment. While it may be free to sign up for the account, the real cost comes with your employees maintaining those accounts and keeping them active in the social communities. Just creating the profiles and leaving them there doesn’t mean you are automatically going to gain a foothold in a social media community.

It takes time and serious effort to engage and truly interact with a community, and in order to do that  you first have to figure out which communities you need to be active in. That takes a lot of resources to start with, doing the due diligence of intense research. From there you formulate your strategy, again another tax on your employees’ time. Then its figuring out just how much of their time needs to be spent engaging and interacting with the community.

While Tools Can Be Free, They Could End Up Costing You In The End

From a tools perspective you need to both monitor and measure. While some tools might be free, such as Google Analytics and Google Alerts, there still is a cost of your employees’ time. Also, the free tools do have a limit of scope and you might find out later that its costing you much more by not having invested in the more expensive tools.

Monitoring tools like Radian6, Meltwater and TrackUR can give you better insight into monitoring your brand and related terms, but at a cost. Measuring tools like ClearSaleing and CoreMetrics can help you gauge how your efforts are affecting your bottom line in finer detail than most free tools.

So when you are hearing all the hype about Twitter, Facebook and YouTube and how these wonderful “Free” tools are helping companies reach new people every day, stop and take a step back away from the hype. Ask yourself, “How many man hours did it take that team to attain that success with the social media site?”  and  “How much time went into research and planning?”. Ask yourself, “How are they measuring success?”. Then ask yourself the final question, “Is it really free?”.

Recently I’ve run into a number of companies who call themselves a  “social media agency”.  Here are some examples (this is not a joke):

1.) Company A

This company sells “engagement marketing” services.  They use an ASP Buzz Monitoring tool (a pretty good one) to identify brand mentions in Blogs, Forums, etc.  When they see a brand mention (positive or negative) they respond on behalf of their client (pretending to be their client).  They also tweet for their clients and build Blogs.  Company A makes much of its money from the markup of the ASP tool they use (I guess their clients don’t know that they could become a direct subscriber to the ASP company and pay far less.) As recently as a year ago, this company called itself a PR Firm.

2.) Company B

This company sells Ambassador Programs.  They have developed an ASP tool that is essentially Ning (except not free and not nearly as robust) with some Analytics behind it.  They use the client’s house email list as well as rented lists to invite current and prospective customers to become an Ambassador for the client.  Ambassadors get to log in to Company B’s super cool tool each month and report on the buzz activities they’ve engaged in on behalf of Company B’s client.   [View Entire Article]

One of the biggest complaints about social media, or rather reasons companies give for not getting involved in it, that I hear time and time again is that they are afraid of what people will say about them, and fear they have no control over that. Unfortunately for these companies what they don’t realize is that this is going on whether they are involved in social media or not. The problem really isn’t that there is something bad being said about them. The real problem is that they (the companies) aren’t listening to what’s being said.

Right now I’m on vacation in Key West. I say that not to make anyone jealous, but more to give a background to this post. See I booked my hotel based on the establishment’s response to some “negative” reviews on a Social Media site called TripAdvisor. I’m staying at the Palms Hotel on White Street here in Key West. I was looking for a quaint hotel, closer to the heart of Key West, but not amidst the busy happenings of Duval Street. I searched through reviews of a lot of hotels and B&B’s when I came across the listing for the Palms, I noticed a few negative reviews. But I also saw the owners, actively engaged in responding to those reviews. [View Entire Article]

A couple of posts ago I wrote about a gentleman from the UK who had made some mistakes that had been captured and spread across the web. How did he get caught up in his situation?  Two men were masquerading as a woman online, basically sitting behind a fake persona.  Is this ethical? No it’s not.  Yet people do it.  On the internet you don’t have to be who you are in real life.  You don’t have to be a spotty 16 year old with a weight issue, you can be an unquestioned expert on lepidoptery.

But what about companies?  Is it fine for them to have employees not identify themselves as employees, or take it even further and pretend to be a member of a different demographic to subtly push the agenda of the company?  Again, no it’s not.  There’s even a term for it – “Sock Puppets”.  What tends to happen is that Brad in marketing slips up when posting as “Brenda, a 58 year old grandmother from Arkansas”, and the community gets suspicious and outs ‘Brenda’.

It’s true that Brad could keep up his persona, indefinitely, and be a ’secret agent’ for the company.  Yet he could still be found out, especially if he’s posting from work (most forums log the IP address of posters, and it’s a simple process to do a reverse lookup to see who owns that IP).

[View Entire Article]

Social media isn’t a fad, and it’s no longer for the early adopters.

 Companies have realized the benefits of integrating social media into their communications strategy, and the downsides of not doing so.  But, there are bound to be companies that make mistakes, running out and implementing ideas that seem great rather than sitting down and thinking them through. Companies that think using social media means that they have to ’shoot from the hip,’ and companies that just don’t get how to play nice with others.   Given the news of the last few weeks, I though it was a good time to throw together some examples:

Boring Boring Facebook

How many times have you been talking to a friend / spouse / relative / co-worker and said or heard:

• “I hate my job”
• “My job’s boring”
• “My boss is a @#&@*(@$(@*”

Sixteen year old Kimberly Swann of Clacton, England wrote on her Facebook page that her job was boring.  She didn’t identify her company, and only her friends could see it, so it shouldn’t have been much of a problem.  However, she then began adding co-workers as friends on Facebook, and one of them reported her to management, which resulted in her instant dismissal.  So now, instead of only her friends seeing her say that Ivell Marketing & Logistics was a boring place to work at, everyone who performs a Google search for their name can see 8 out of 10 listings (plus a Google News listing) that talk about the firm firing a 16 year old for being in the natural state for her demographic -  bored.

Ryanair hates bloggers

A blogger by the name of Jason Roe though that he’d found a flaw in low cost airline Ryanair’s booking system, whereby flights could be booked for $0.  It turned out that he couldn’t actually complete the transaction, and it was really just a gui error.  His post did get the attention of Ryanair, with one of their representatives thanking him for informing them of the error by saying

jason!  you’re an idiot and a liar!!

erm… well, then another staffer chimed in to continue praising him with

Website is not perfect, Life is not perfect…
If you would work in your pathetic life on a such big project in a such busy environment with so little resources, you would know that the most important is to have usual user behavior scenarios working rather than spending time on improbable and harmless things. We very well know about these anomalies and unless it is not critical we are not going to sacrifice time to this.
If you would be a serious programmer you would know these things and would not post any of this on the web if you would think it can cause us troubles, but you would report to us directly.
Even you did not discover anything major you are still trying to benefit from this.
If I would be you I would think of consequences this can have.
If you would be a serious developer you would work out your About page as well. Or is this really about you? What is that bunch of links there? I could give my review of those websites and it would not be positive probably, but really I don’t know if you actually worked on them or what exactly you did and how big influence you had to make changes there. So keep working on yourself and don’t post bollocks.

Wonderful customer service.  But surely when management found out what their staff had said they’d correct the situation and smooth things out with the blogosphere?

It is Ryanair policy not to waste time and energy in corresponding with idiot bloggers, and Ryanair can confirm that it won’t be happening again. Lunatic bloggers can have the blog sphere all to themselves, as our people are far too busy driving down the cost of air travel.

Ok… that cleared it up… Maybe they didn’t care because they knew that they were going to release some news a few days later that would knock this off the radar?  Yes, when they announced that they were thinking of instituting pay toilets on planes.

Twittering Skittles

Skittles.com has recently changed to be completely social media generated (bar the contact form).  Their site has links to their Flickr page, YouTube page, Facebook fan page and a twitter search stream on “skittles”.  Even their product pages aren’t company created, they instead point to the wikipedia pages for each product.  Their home page currently shows their ‘chatter’ page, which is the aforementioned twitter stream.

Is this innovative, risky or both?  More importantly is it working for them?  If their intention was to increase the chatter around skittles on Twitter, then I’d have to say that they’ve accomplished that as I’m seeing a lot of mentions in the feeds I’m subscribed to.  Now, as to whether that chatter is worthwhile chatter is another matter…

As for risks; right now people are having fun with the feed, writing anything they want and including skittles in the tweet.  That will naturally calm down as people get bored with it and move onto something else.  However, that doesn’t mean that someone with an agenda couldn’t disrupt this for them.  Say for example that an animal rights group decided that they wanted to publicize the fact that Skittles contains gelatin.  All they’d have to do is set up Twitter accounts and push that out every so often for it to get visibility on the Skittles home page.

Then there’s the issue of how a regular searcher would see when they hit the site.  I would think that they’ll think that there’s something wrong, or maybe even that the site’s been hacked, especially if the text on page is of an off-color nature.

For those that get social media, where’s the participation by Skittles?  All the feed shows is other people mentioning Skittles, there’s not even a mention of an official Skittles twitter account for people to follow.  This would have been an ideal opportunity to build such an account up, and have it engage with Twitterers (Tweeters?), as they do on Facebook, etc.

They’ve taken an interesting tack with their site, but I don’t think it’s the right move to make it stand-alone (sure, there’s participation on the Facebook page, but that’s not the focus of the site).  Ideally there should be at least a content wrapper around the site, explaining why the site is structured this way, and how people can interact with it, and with the people at Skittles.

ADDITIONAL: After writing this post, Skittles moved the Twitter feed off their home page, and instead made the Facebook page display as the default page.

So, who’s Stuart Slann, why does he need advice, and why from us?

Stuart is an Englishman who decided to cheat on his wife with a Scottish woman he met on Facebook.  Affairs of the heart are things that happen all of the time, the world over, so what’s special about this one?  Well, the ‘woman’ turned out to be 2 men that had met Stuart on holiday in Mexico several months earlier.

Back then, they’d got into an argument over their soccer teams, which ended with the 2 Liverpool-supporters throwing Manchester-United-supporting Stuart (sporting a broken ankle and rib from an earlier para- sailing incident) into the hotel pool.

Rather than letting this be the end of it, these 2 then decided upon a new way to get at Stuart, and ‘Emma’ was born.  Over the next few months, Stuart and Emma had several, increasingly intimate discussions.  This culminated in Stuart agreeing to drive 9 hours from his home in Sheffield to a remote location in Scotland outside of Aberdeen to consummate their relationship.

Upon arriving, they communicated by text, with Emma asking Stuart to take a video off himself performing a NSFW (not safe for work) act with a sex toy.  He complied and sent it to her, then waited for 3 hours for her to ‘get off work.’

At the appointed time, he received a phone call from ‘Emma’, which was where the ‘joke’ was revealed to him.   Surprisingly, he seemed to take it quite well…maybe because he realized that ultimately, he’d put himself in this position.  Sure, the 2 ‘gentlemen’ had played him, but he’d made the decision to cheat and drive 9 hours to meet someone he’d never met.

What’s happened to Stuart in the month since this happened?  Well, the 2 Liverpool fans released the tape of the phone call as a video, with the video of Stuart and the sex toy as the background.

As you may imagine, this has been picked up by quite a few news sources – from international newspapers, to blogs, to soccer sites.  Many talk about the cruelty of the prank, but all of them giving the facts, talk about what happened to Stuart, and link to the video.  A Google search for “Stuart Slann” returns 702,000 results.  I went through the first 100 to see what was out there… and not 1 was unrelated.  Everything was about tale of deceit and treachery (that applies to both parties).

Reputation management wise, Stuart has one heck of a job on his hands.  With hundreds / thousands of pages that talk about him, some on very respected news sites, and the video having over 500k views…what should he do?  Can he do anything that will get rid of all of this?

Well, honestly, not really.  He has 2 options at this point.  The first of those is to lie low, and just wait until the story dies down.  Some of those articles will fade from the search results; as some sites expire their stories, with some fading due as their postings become stale over time.  However, in all likelihood, there are probably still going to be quite a few that stick around for his name – for the next time a new employer wants to find out about him or a potential girlfriend wants to check him out (his wife left him after the story broke).  Sure, he can build up sites and profiles for his name to push them off the front page, or even further down.  But, it’s going to take time and effort.

Stuart’s second option is to embrace it, sell his story to the press, and make some short-term cash off his experience.  Everyone knows about it, his marriage is over, so why not get his side of the story out…(not that it would particularly alter the search results given that the story that’s out now is apparently fairly accurate)?

Personal reputation management is a concern that everyone should have. Anything that you do can and may be used against you by anyone.  It’s all well and good believing nothing can happen to you in a protected community, where only your approved friends can see what you’ve said or posted.  But, all it takes is one upset friend or a fake friend to take what you’ve done and put it elsewhere.  Suddenly, you’re ruined.  Your boss finds out what you said about him.  Your spouse finds out about the pictures of you and your co-worker at the company party, etc.

Everyone has done and said things that they don’t want others to know about.  But, in this instant, connected world; there’s more of a danger than ever before that the lid of your personal Pandora’s box will open up and everything gets out…never to be placed back in the box.

So, think before you share.  Think before you put it on the Web.  Think before you post that photo.

…and most definitely, think before you video yourself with a sex toy to send to a person you’ve never met…

Unfortunately, there are no hard and fast rules to making successful games.  But, here are a few of the pitfalls to watch out for. Make sure you do a lot of testing, particularly in your target demographic because the last thing you want to do is create a game…

…that isn’t fun. Well, duh! Then, why make a game? No game designer ever sets out to make a game that’s as fun as watching linoleum curl, but it does happen. Sometimes, it’s from too many features, sometimes too few, sometimes it’s poor art direction, sometimes it’s a poor scoring system or recharge system, or saving system, or some minuscule, insignificant thing that annoys the heck out of the player.

Whatever takes them out of the game world or frustrates them as a side effect of playing the game (frustration as a direct result of game play i.e. “That Boss is so darn hard!” can be a good thing, in moderation) will kill the fun and your profits.

…that isn’t playable. If the controls to fire your weapon is “Press F1 while holding down X for one shot or V for rapid fire then hold down Y for normal bullets Q for hollow bullets and W for radio active bullets,” that would be enough – but, you probably also have to move while shooting. Make sure your controls are easy to use, intuitive, and if it will be played on the computer, easily reachable. The easier it is to play the more often people will do it, particularly for casual games. A higher end game will require a more sophisticated control system with more options, but ease of use is still the name of the game.

…that isn’t consistent. You should have a logical progression of levels, power ups, enemies, gameplay, etc.  Each level should feel like a part of the larger game (unless you’re making something like WarioWare where moving around randomly from one mini-game to the next is the point).

Each level should be a slightly different with slightly more difficult variation of the level before or there should be a pattern/story progression to levels that vary wildly from the “normal” game play – e.g. every third level is a vehicle level or the last level on each “world” is a certain type while all the others are the same type of gameplay.

This will allow the player to get a feel for how the game works and enjoy mastering more difficult variations. Otherwise, it feels like you’re thrown into a room full of Sproogly Wishum. What the heck is that, you ask? I don’t know either and neither will the player.

…that’s too hard. If you make the game too hard no player will want to play it. If only 10% of players make it past the first level, then…90% of your audience isn’t engaged long enough to care about your game, let alone your product.

…that’s too easy. If even a two-year-old can play your game, twenty-five-year-olds won’t be engaged very long, unless you can somehow make it addictive. If your audience is two-year-olds, however, then you’re probably on the right track.

The first few levels should be fairly easy as people get a grasp on how the game works. The game should then increase in difficulty until only the most expert/time-devoted players can get past each level. Think of Tetris on the original NES (That’s Nintendo Entertainment System (TM) for you marketers who never had a childhood or had one before 1985.)

It had a very simple concept: make complete line. But, as the levels got higher and higher, the irregular blocks came faster and faster until most people could not flip the blocks fast enough and filled the screen to their geometric doom. (My personal best on the NES Tetris was 199 lines. Yes, I’m still proud of that. No, I don’t care how many you got on X implementation of it unless you beat me on the NES version, and then, I’ll probably cry.)

…who’s tone doesn’t fit the company or the audience. A Toddler game probably wouldn’t go over well for Rolex, nor would a Gothic Horror game be the next big thing for the over-50 set. So, make sure the tone both fits the company image you wish to portray and will be appealing to the audience you’re targeting.

…that’s one big advertisement. An advertisement in game form won’t win you any awards nor will it engender any goodwill from your clients. In fact, it’ll do more harm than good. Yes, there are companies that are testing in-game advertising but …

A. No one’s come up with a good model for it yet and B. Those marketers are building upon a gaming “infrastructure” that’s already in place. If you’re building that infrastructure, you don’t want to throw an advertisement at your house of cards. The whole thing will tumble down. You’ll have thrown money away AND angered a large percentage of those people who played your game and might have become new, loyal customers.

As you embark upon this brave new world, may you always remember one thing: you can lead a gamer to water, but you can’t make him take a shower, unless, maybe, you happen to be his mother. (Even then, it’s a crap shoot.)

In any case, Happy Gaming!

Facebook owns you!! That’s right.  Everything you’ve ever put on Facebook can be used by Facebook however they please.  Think by closing your account everything will go away?  Wrong.  It’s now property of Facebook FOREVER!!

On February 4th, Facebook updated its Terms of Service (TOS) to basically take away any rights you have to any content you’ve added to Facebook or any other information you’ve provided them.  Consumerist.com has a nice write up on the changes to the TOS and it looks like Facebook may have a growing backlash to the changes they’ve made.  Twitter is a buzz (or should I say a tweeting) about the topic and over on Digg, the consumerist.com article is one of the most digged articles in the last 24 hours.  There is also a Facebook group that has formed and is exploding with new members. 

It will be interesting to see if Facebook listens to its users whom they depend on for success or ignore the growing backlash and keep the changes to their TOS.  One thing is for certain…now you never really know for sure what’s going to happen with your content once you’ve uploaded it to your Facebook profile.     

So, the next time you’re about to upload new pictures, videos, or other content – take a second and think if it’s really something you want to make available now and more importantly, forever!

Pete Blackshaw’s recent interview with HHS Web Manager Andrew P Wilson (which took place on Twitter) is an interesting and informative look into how social media can/should be used and the mindset required for success.  Maybe it is because the goal of HHS  in this instance was focused on public service (getting timely information to the public about the salmonella/peanut butter crisis) but Andrew’s approach and philosophy feels like a much needed breath of fresh air.  Andrew and his colleagues seem to see Social Media as — first and foremost — a way to better serve the people they are trying to build a relationship with. Unfortunately, many organizations  still approach Social Media with one thing on their minds:  How do we  get people to do what WE think is important?  

Andrew’s group is way out ahead in a couple of other areas as well:
1.) An in-house team dedicated to exploring and using social technologies and channels to accomplish many different things;

2.) An integrated Social Media Center that includes HHS, CDC, the FDA and other agencies who work together to create synergies and to learn lessons from each other.  (Wow!  What a concept! Rather than recreating the wheel in multiple agencies, they coordinate their efforts.   If the U.S. government can make this work in spite of security issues and heavily firewalled siloes, it can’t be that hard for companies to accomplish.)

Obviously HHS is still in the beginning stages, but they deserve kudos for their work thus far.  This is, in many ways, more sophisticated than what we’ve seen from some big brands.