Staff Sgt. Joshua Salmons is the Emerging Media Coordinator at the Defense Information School. He works to determine curriculum standards for social media instruction for public affairs officers and enlisted personnel and develops training modules and seminars for DINFOS staff. He works with emerging media outlets from across the military to make sure their social training needs are being met and serves on several steering committees and policy discussion panels regarding DOD social media policy. Why does the military need to embrace social media? It’s not a social media problem, per se. The military needs to embrace social media because it represents a remarkable change in communication. Clay Shirky calls it the “mass amateurization” of journalism — the fact that barriers of entry to mass communication are now so low that everyone has the potential to speak to the world for little more than the cost of an Internet connection. Research from the Pew groups shows a large and accelerating shift in how people get their news. The legacy news industry is dying quickly, for a number of reasons, one being a stubbornness to adapt to audience needs. I heard a reporter from CNN speaking on a panel at the 2009 Army Worldwide Public Affairs Symposium say that we, as PA personnel, will miss reporters when they are gone. She realized that, while her industry was dying, they still served a vital pure storytelling function. And I believe she is right — journalists will always be needed to put words to experiences. The problem with the legacy news industry was the resistance to change. The military faces the same dilemma. We are just lagging behind the immediate effects of the communication paradigm shift that is social media. Former Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki said, “If you dislike change, you’ll like irrelevance even less,” and I agree. Sometimes we have to change, otherwise our audience will change and leave us. I like to think of it in terms of history. If we look back at the early 20 th century, America was faced with a shift in transportation paradigm. Automobiles had been in existence since the 1700s. Then, they were steam powered. They often broke, blew up and killed people — wonderful devices. But in the early 1900s, cars became more practical. They became commercially viable. People started buying them in greater numbers. Companies, and then the government, had to make a choice: either they could continue creating products and infrastructure to cater to horses, or they could adopt new products and laws to handle the influx of these new machines. The transportation idea was the same — moving a person from point A to point B faster than walking. It’s just that cars brought along a whole new set of circumstances that had to be adapted to. Similarly, we face such a shift with communication. Companies (those who produce products, in our case, stories, photos and broadcasts) have to make a choice. We can keep making saddles for horses — because we make great saddles, right? We’ve never made better saddles. That’s not the issue. The issue is, will we be able to keep selling thousands or millions of saddles as cars take over horses as the preferred method of transportation? Nope. We can keep making saddles — great and awesome saddles – but our influence will shrink to a niche market. Our other choice is to take our existing skills and adapt them to the new paradigm. In the transportation example, that would be like a saddle company taking its expertise in leatherworking to make seats for cars. In the communications example, it’s news organizations taking their storytelling experience to produce blogs and quality social media content to engage others. All that to say, social media isn’t the issue, per se. If the military does not break out of its mold and learn to adapt, the world will move on. We will be ignored. When you first began to propose using social tools, what kinds of objections were you hearing from your commanders? There are a lot of objections. In 2005, when I was blogging in Iraq, the objections were a lot more paranoid. Commanders and OPSEC officers saw social media as a security risk. I even was told in a briefing that if I blogged, I would be killing soldiers. That sort of prejudice can’t be countered. Military bloggers kept operating in quasi-secret. Later, the culture began to shift. In 2007 I started meeting others who were pushing for the same things with social media in the military — that it was an extension and amplification of public affairs goals, not a counter to military storytelling. Last year saw a lot of DOD high-level leaders embracing social media. They were sold on the idea of it. And strategic leaders are pretty easy to convince. So long as I do my homework and research relevant statistics, any good leader will see the cost- and time-saving benefits of social media tools as good for the organization. The junior levels usually already use social media because of generational preferences. It’s the large middle chunk that is the problem. Usually those leaders have the most to lose — either they are bucking for promotion, or they know if things go south, CEOs are rarely relieved. It’s far easier to can a few middle managers. So, in regards to more “normal” objections, now that we’re largely past the “social media will lead to the zombie apocalypse” phase, many commanders still see the security vulnerabilities as a show stopper. Some cite bandwidth concerns. Some are unsure where to start and draw attention to staff shortages. I also hear that social media is nothing but a productivity waster. How did you answer those objections? Each case is different. I take a look at the organization, how they work, what their communication goals are (surprisingly, many organizations can’t articulate them), and how they might benefit from new tools in their workflow. If I can get some managers to buy off on social media, implement small changes and begin to shift workplace culture, advocating more sweeping mindset changes become easier. Internal communicators become external communicators as discussions migrate from internal wikis and blogs to Facebook and external communities. It’s like proselytizing. But, more specifically, to the charge of security vulnerabilities, I try to work through what specific vulnerabilities they are referring to. Internal hosting of tools mitigates a lot of them. Training mitigates the rest. E-mail is still the No. 1 source of viruses and worms, but we don’t throw out e-mail. It’s too crucial to our workflow. Social media has some of the same vulnerabilities, sure, but there are tools to mitigate risk just like with e-mail, computer use or the chance that a spouse will give away information on the phone. Short of locking up all employees in the basement, there will always be security risks. Social media does have its own set of vulnerabilities, but to write it off as a lost cause because of the risk is overreacting, in my opinion. When commanders cite productivity concerns, I try to point out that lazy people are lazy people, be it around a water cooler or on Facebook. It’s a management issue, not a social media issue. If someone takes a four-hour lunch, a manager reprimands the employee and takes actions to alter behavior. The manager doesn’t ban lunch. To the charge of staff shortages and not knowing where to put already stretched resources in the social media world, I try to be as encouraging as possible. I understand where they are coming from. We are all told to do more with less. I keep trying to advocate an examination of current practices, though. If 70% of a shop’s time is devoted to publishing a physical newsletter that only gets to 12% or 14% of its audience, I would ask the organization to rethink how it interfaces with its public. It’s not just a matter of doing more with the same docket of activities. Sometimes it involves rescinding old practices to better interface with the public. Do you need to separate your enthusiasm for a given technology from your pitch? How do you do that? Communication planning. As much as I might love cloud computing, the development of strong AI, augmented reality, etc; if an avenue of emerging media doesn’t meet the communication goals of the organization I’m speaking to, then it’s a time-waster. Luckily, it’s easy for me to do this as a government employee. I’m not peddling any particular product. I’m not racking up billable hours. I’m busy like everyone else. I don’t have time to go on and on. I want goals so we can develop a plan. Then we implement. Then we measure. Bam! Done. My enthusiasm for emerging technologies might increase the number of potential tools I can bring to bear on any given project, but at my current level, I’m free to explore or ignore certain sectors of emerging media without profitability standing in the way. Is it more important to have the leadership mandate it or to have the rank-and-file clamoring for access? Whose support do you need most to get an organization to adopt a new technology? Both, if possible. I use a lot of tongue-in-cheek revolutionary rhetoric, but there are a lot of parallels between the political revolutionary process and the “revolution” of workplace culture. Both deal with the disenfranchised, both desire real and sweeping changes. If the top-level leadership comes on board, then there is a bloodless coup and the new regime moves forward together. If the top-level leadership stands against it, then the rank-and-file need to clamor away until the ruckus can’t be ignored. Luckily, there aren’t too many showdowns. When dealing with overall organizational health and profitability, top-level leadership usually is open for new ideas. If, instead, they see the organization as their personal plaything and are unwilling to discuss innovation, then I put forward they are a terrible leader. In those cases, social media is probably only one of many, many problems with retention, profitability and command climate. The key element to a successful social media revolution is the middle. It’s the middle management. It’s the experienced and influential co-workers. I, as some social media champion, can rattle my saber and make fantastic briefings all I want, but if I can’t secure the hearts of the middle, any change will eventually stall and die. I see it at DINFOS. My attempts at change have been somewhat successful, but so much will fade when I leave. The school doesn’t even have any plans to replace me. We will see if any of the progress we’ve made will persist. I was unable to get enough face time and convince enough of the middle — the long-staying employees, to go along with things. I can give a briefing and get any one group of people fired up, but without the middle, it is ephemeral. I would say junior and top levels are easy. Convincing the middle is the challenge.
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Making a military-grade case for social media
While today’s online media are abuzz with the latest and greatest social media tactics and tools, for many of us that have been around a little while, it was blogging that started our social media careers. It’s funny to think that in 2002 a type of site called “blog” came up on my radar as a possible marketing tool. At the time, many blogs were personal diaries posted anonymously or by people with a little tech savvy and plenty of opinion. Writing personal thoughts on a public web site was absolutely the last thing I would ever consider doing. However, it was a curious thing and I started a few blogs anonymously to see what it was like. Unfortunately, the excercise was so foreign, poorly executed and without feedback, that I deleted them. In mid 2003 I began looking for online content outside of forums and started reading several SEO blogs including Search Engine Blog (Peter Da Vanzo), Search Blog (John Battelle) and Search Engine Lowdown (Andy Beal). Interestingly, only Search Blog remains what it was. In December 2003 after using Blogger.com as a group blog software for a few collaboration projects I finally decided to start a blog under the blogspot.com domain for TopRank Online Marketing , which by then, had been in business about 2 years. As you can see from my “ Hello World ” post in Dec 2003, I had humble goals to post news and information related to online marketing. We had a web site that pulled in a lot of search traffic, why would we need a blog? The reason was simply to see what blogging could do to get the word out about our expertise and to share information. Blogging was very new territory and there wasn’t anyone to demonstrate best practices, so I set out to find what those were while sharing links, news and resources. I suspect there are a good number of companies that treat other social media services the same way, whether it’s Twitter, Foursquare or building a social mobile app. It’s new territory and they want to find out whether those applications or sites would make sense in their marketing mix. The problem with that perspective is that it’s about the most inefficient and unproductive way to go about finding the right online marketing channels for a business. The biggest mistake I made 6 plus years ago when I started blogging was not creating a strategy. As a marketer, I knew better than to chase a tactic, but I had no idea at the time how much of an impact blogging would have on our business. In other words, despite a lack of strategy, we were able to use our marketing savvy, curiosity and interest in connecting with the online marketing community to achieve many of the goals we set out to reach in our business. It just took a lot longer without that strategic plan. Companies starting down the path of becoming more social in their culture to better connect with customers and to realize the marketing, PR, and customer service benefits from social media participation don’t need to waste that time. Doing the homework of researching customers, setting goals and developing a strategy are essential steps towards a successful social media marketing experience. Back to why I started blogging. The SEO community was a lot smaller in 2003 and 2004. Writing a post about anything to do with search engine optimization would be noticed and commented on by the small number of SEO bloggers. There were plenty of cross links and “hat tips” (whatever happened to those?) and openly shared opinions. Blogging even made a number of SEOs very popular, very quickly. Blogging to get popular is the goal for some people and there certainly is some relationship between notoriety, awareness and credibility with the ability to attract sales. The key (for me at least) is that creating awareness of oneself is simply a proxy to gaining visibility for your business. It’s not a goal in itself. As a result, Ive been open about using visibility to help others and make connections. The turning point for me in blogging was due in part to learning to liveblog at conferences. Steve Hall of AdRants provided my first opportunity to liveblog at a ad:tech event - an absolutely humbling experience for anyone that isn’t a natural writer. I met people like Frank Gruber and David Berkowitz at that event in 2004. I did some liveblogging for Barry Schwartz and Search Engine Roundtable after that which also provided great exposure and connections. Matt McGowan brought even more exposure opportunity by having Online Marketing Blog as a media sponsor for SES conferences . There’s a huge list of people that have been very helpful over the years, especially our longtime readers. Since then we’ve published a lot of content and provided a lot of insight into holistic SEO and online marketing topics. During that time I think the most important thing I’ve learned is to find your voice and stick to it. Don’t try to be what you’re not. It simply doesn’t resonate with readers or with the goals you’ve likely set. Whether it’s blogging or other types of content and networking, I think the real value from online publishing in a social context is of course, being social. Blogging has been a great experience in terms of developing relationships with people I would have never connected with otherwise. It has definitely served as a platform for making connections in the industry that have led directly and indirectly, to a lot of new business. I started blogging personally as an experiment and found a process and strategy along the way that has helped grow our business and the online marketing/sales performance of many of our clients. Long time blogging provides ample opportunity to make and learn from mistakes. Blogging also allows us to continue to be a resource while sharing our expertise with potential customers, partners and employees. We’ll be going through yet another evolution with Online Marketing Blog in the next month or two and I wonder about the experiences of our readers that also blog: If you’re a blogger, why did you start? What’s your blogging story? Did you start as an experiment? Did you start with a strategy? What was your biggest mistake? What have you learned? © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story? | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com
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How I Started Blogging. What’s Your Story?
One of the most insightful voices in the online marketing industry when it comes to advertising is Max Kalehoff of Clickable . I was introduced to Max at a Search Insider Summit conference several years ago with very high regard by David Berkowitz , another intelligent voice in the industry, so I knew immediately he was someone to pay attention to. Max’s company recently announced the addition of Facebook Advertising to their PPC management platform and he was very kind to take the time to answer several detailed questions about social media advertising on the Clickable platform, the future of the online advertising industry, slimy SEO middlemen, how he stays current and blogging about his Weber grill. 1. You have impressive credentials in the interactive marketing industry with your experience working at Jupiter, comScore and Nielsen. How did you come to work with Clickable? It’s mostly luck. I’ve been fortunate to work with a series of successful startup teams and entrepreneurs that played a key role in shaping the Internet. I came to Clickable from Nielsen , which bought our last startup, BuzzMetrics, the pioneer in social media measurement and research. I admire Nielsen and have many close friends there, but I wanted to build things and innovate again in a startup environment. Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures, a Clickable investor, introduced me to David Kidder and Munish Gandhi, Clickable’s co-founders. I shared their vision for helping businesses succeed by simplifying online advertising. We quickly became friends and colleagues and the rest is history. What’s behind your passion for building early stage companies? Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been passionate about building things, solving creative problems and exploring new territory. I’ve always tried to live out those passions through education, work, hobbies and family life. With work, entrepreneurial ventures are the best outlets for those passions. When I was in college, I started two summer businesses. The first was sailboat charter business, and the second was a Web development consultancy. Post college, I spent a few years in the marketing agency business but soon threw myself into technology and Web startup life. There’s nothing more invigorating than working closely with a group of like-minded, passionate people trying to change the world. Big companies have their purpose, but nimble upstarts attract smart people who crave abstract problems, peer-to-peer learning, mastery, self-imposed discipline and persistence. Upstarts also require a lot of risk-taking, serendipity and authentic discovery. To me, that’s the only way to live. And given the mess our world is in, we need more of these minds and ventures to invent our way to a better future. For the uninitiated, what is Clickable and what types of companies should be using it? Clickable is a software-as-a-service platform that makes online advertising simple, instant and profitable. Our tools empower beginners to professionals, and companies of all sizes, to maximize their advertising investment. We have three core products: Our flagship Pro tool is a simple dashboard that empowers marketers to manage online advertising with transformational return on investment. Clickable Pro activates instantly with an intuitive experience that makes it easy to manage performance across all major advertising networks, like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and, now, Facebook. Clickable Pro is complemented by Clickable Assist, a managed service that delivers agile assistance to maximize online advertising success. Finally, Clickable Platform is a white-label solution for big services companies to rapidly deploy large-scale online advertising programs to their local business customers under their own brands. We have a simple purpose that ties everything together: to help businesses survive and thrive by simplifying online advertising success. We pursue that purpose by living up to three core values that comprise our DNA: 7:1 – The 7:1 ratio of good to bad acknowledges we’re not perfect. This is a powerful admission that enables us to listen better and constantly improve. This underlies transparency, trust and collaboration with each other and our customers. Simplicity – Our complex world is desperate for simplicity. Simplicity is difficult, yet it creates value, differentiation and opportunity. That’s why we make everything simple and beautiful. And – We are multidimensional. We innovate constantly to perfect our product-to-market fit … And we are a competitive sales culture that closes business. We celebrate both. Recently the Clickable ad management platform announced the incorporation of Facebook ads. Being able to track Facebook and search marketing PPC programs side by side seems a significant opportunity for all. What should advertisers, especially small and medium sized businesses that you serve, expect from social media advertising? What kind of advice do you give to temper expectations? Or do you even need to? We first removed the complexity that prevented marketers from expanding into search networks besides Google AdWords, by introducing a simple interface that marketers could use to manage all of their search marketing campaigns. It’s become clear that the next place where marketers want a simple, effective solution is on the world’s largest social network: Facebook. With over 400 million members, Facebook introduces a new way to advertise that complements search marketing. Using extensive demographic targeting criteria, advertisers on Facebook can get out ahead of their customers and create demand that they can later capture with their search campaigns. Marketers can also use Facebook to promote their brands and drive direct sales. Indeed, this is new territory for everyone. We look forward to experimenting with our advertisers to surface best practices and customer profiles that achieve success. In the course of doing business with many SMBs in conjunction with TopRankSMB , a surprising number of marketers mention having “tried PPC and it didn’t work”. In most cases it’s due to a lack of knowledge, tools and time to gain the knowledge to run a successful search marketing ad campaign. What advice do you find yourself or your company giving SMBs most often in regard to online advertising? What tips can you give to those just starting out? Indeed, we found that up to 50% of SMBs that try online advertising don’t succeed, primarily because of complexity. Similarly, a recent study we conducted on SMBs indicated that roughly half don’t properly track conversions. Knowing conversions is the first step in how an advertiser defines success, whether it’s generating a lead, having someone fill in a form or making a sale. Tracking conversions is important in directing your ad investment to the keywords that will drive the greatest return on investment. There’s a lot of talk about efficiency of click-throughs and cost-per-click, but in the end what really matters is the return on your ad spend, and the profitability of your business. Our most common advice? First, make sure you are tracking your results, and don’t do anything until your analytics are effectively in place. Second, embrace “goal-based advertising” — that is, make investments only toward very specific and realistic business goals. That requires determining the monetary value of your goals, and figuring out which of your services and products have enough potential to justify spend. Finally, invest the time to get educated in PPC and do it right, or hire sometime to do it for you. Otherwise, you will quickly become another statistic in the “tried PPC and it didn’t work” category. That’s a disadvantageous outcome for most businesses. You really hit a nerve with, Brands: Beware Of Slimy SEO Middlemen Meddling Through Social Media . The behavior of the SEO account exec you interacted with is strikingly similar to how many media relations people and start-up business owners behave when they pitch us to write about them on Online Marketing Blog. It’s often a bucket of fake suck-uppiness wrapped around a pitch for a single, short term outcome. It’s sad because something far more significant could be achieved if they looked past the one “placement”. Client demands drive a lot of this behavior and agencies of all types (SEO and PR) often comply. What’s your advice on creating a more meaningful connection with bloggers? My advice for creating a more meaningful connection with bloggers is the same as my advice for success in life: Give more value than you take. If you provide unselfish value, then people will become attracted to you and they will advocate you. Advocacy may result in links, testimonials, business referrals, constructive feedback, partnership, loyalty and friendship. But calculating relationships purely based on SEO objectives can quickly become a risk to your brand. It’s that simple. I like that you can switch from “ My New Weber Grill ” to “ Social and Search Advertising “. As an accomplished and long time blogger, what advice do you have for other interactive and marketing types for blogging over the long haul? How has your own blog affected your career and work? How satisfied are you with your corporate blogging efforts? It’s important to acknowledge that despite all the experts and gurus, the Social Media and Interactive bible is far from completion. We’re only in the beginning of the first chapter, and we’re all students. With that in mind, I think more successful blogging and social media efforts have a defined purpose, goals and room for lots of experimentation. My personal blog is very much me, reflecting the perpetual blur between my professional and home life. They are impossible to separate, and the tension between the two is what makes life interesting. My blog has created an online presence that’s delivered myriad opportunities. It’s led to new business, new friendships, introspection and (in some cases) breaktrhough ideas. I also believe a personal blog is the best laboratory to become fluent and personally vested in interactive technologies. The learning I gained from my personal blogging endeavors directly contributed to some of our more successful interactive marketing strategies at Clickable. I know we’re already into Q2 but what predictions can you offer on the future of paid search for the rest of 2010? What are your thoughts on: Microsoft and Yahoo, Mobile PPC, sponsored social content or what’s next for Google and it’s array of advertising opportunities? Our Q1 2010 analysis of search spending among advertisers on the Clickable Platform reveals that budgets are significantly higher in Q1 versus year-ago, suggesting an economic and advertising rebound. We have seen 75% of our advertisers increase their budgets versus year-ago, while 25% maintained flat or slightly decreased budgets. Based on Q1, we forecast that 2010 full-year search budgets will increase anywhere between 10% and 30% versus 2009. Meanwhile, search budgets are diversifying in terms of network distribution. Microsoft/Bing seems to be gaining ground on Yahoo and Google. Last year, only 5% of customers were using Microsoft/Bing, while currently this percentage is at 9%. We believe one of the big stories in 2010 will be gains in social-network advertising, particularly Facebook. Inefficiencies and behavioral friction have prevented serious experimental dollars to shift, especially among PPC marketers. Social advertising will grow dramatically in 2010 as the major social networks surface in third-party management tools, as well as improve their own self-serve dashboards. A lot of advertisers are highly interested in seizing new opportunities to connect with customers. Mobile advertising is picking up speed, but won’t be terribly relevant for most advertisers in 2010. You blog and write for MediaPost which I recommend people read. How do you stay current yourself? Do you have a short list of industry conferences, blogs, newsletters, Twitter handles or books that you’d recommend? I read a mix of news aggregators and thinkers in strategy, venture capital, tech and media, including: TechMeme , John Hagel , Fred Wilson , Umaire Haque , Jeff Jarvis , All Things Digital , TechCrunch , BusinessInsider , NYTimes Bits and (of course) TopRank’s Online Marketing Blog . While I write a weekly opinion column for MediaPost , I believe it’s one of the most thorough and ubiquitous sources of hard news in the interactive advertising industry. I’m also blessed with a quirky list of friends whom I pay close attention to on Twitter , and they reward me with serendipity, personal tips and reading recommendations. I’ve not read any good business books in years, so I’ve abandoned them for fiction, history and poetry. The market is saturated with conferences and good ones are becoming rare; the best ones tend to be grass roots, niche and local, like many Meetups. We co-founded the New York SEMPO Search Meetup , which now has a passionate following of more than 1,000 members. We also founded and run Interesting Cafe, a discussion series that features some of the greatest living innovators in tech, media, culture and science. Small, passionate gatherings like these have the most profound and positive impact. Thanks Max! Max Kalehoff is vice president of marketing for Clickable , a platform that makes online advertising simple, instant and profitable. He also authors AttentionMax . © Online Marketing Blog , 2010. | Max Kalehoff on Social Media Advertising, Blogging & the Future of Paid Search | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com
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Max Kalehoff on Social Media Advertising, Blogging & the Future of Paid Search