Marketing Ninja

The other day I’m browsing Monster.com, looking for a job, and I come across one that I find interesting. I visit the company’s website and start gathering information about their product line; I read the basic copy written about the product line and then I see a bunch of links to case studies, additional information, and use-specific metrics.

But when I click on one of the links I see this:

Thanks for your interest in X; if you’d like more information about X or any of Company Z’s product, please call Y at (000) 000-0000 or email him at…

The Case for Creating Exclusion Barriers

I understand why companies create exclusion barriers for access to detailed information about their products; they create artificial extra steps simply to collect contact information for sales leads down the road. If I leave my phone number, name, and email address, the company will have everything it needs to contact me and subsequently market to me.

Essentially, by forcing me to contact the company in order to get more information about the product, the company is creating a new touchpoint in their marketing process. Great; so now the company can contact all of their leads, people who figure that the additional information regarding the product line is worth the time taken to contact the firm.

The Overwhelming Evidence Against It

The costs of artificial exclusion barriers outweigh the benefits. What does the company have to lose by making more information available publicly and hassle-free? Competition? Oh, please; like a single phone call is going to stop a determined, semi-competent competitor from getting access to that information.

Off the top of my head, here are a few costs of using artificial exclusion barriers:

• Deters Casual Browsers - The biggest cost is that exclusion barriers keep out potential customers who are interested in your product but don’t want the hassle of contacting your company. These browsers might be interested in your product, but as soon as they see that “call Susan at blah blab blah” message it’s game over. Why not let them get additional information on your product with no hassle instead of letting them walk away?
• Deters Potential Job Applicants - I couldn’t get any more information on the company’s product. When I apply for jobs, the first thing I look at, before salary, benefits, location, or anything else is the product. If the product is something I can get excited about, then I can look at other information regarding a position. If I can’t get the information I need about your company’s product, then I can’t get excited about the product and I’m probably not going to bother applying for a position.
• Makes Your Firm Look Like Control Freaks - By forcing the customer to step into your walled garden in order to see the fruit you immediately portray your firm as one that’s not interested in letting the customers arrive at a decision at their own pace; by making them go through gateways you make it clear that your firm must be in control of the marketing flow in order for any sort of transaction to go through.
• Hassles the Customer without much Benefit to the Customer - Simply stated, people don’t like having to jump through hoops to make your job easier.

If you’re making a website about your product, for the love of God just put everything out in the open and let customers browse through it at your own leisure; it’s easier, and puts the customers in control over the marketing process, and that’s honestly a better approach given the general “informing” trend that consumers across the board are experiencing.

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Tom from TomsTechBlog wrote a piece today about the backlash against social media consultants and “social media experts.” I originally started writing this piece as a comment in response to his post but I decided to make a full post out of it.

The basic issue is that the advice handed out by most “social media consultants” fails to help businesses achieve their long-run objectives and the entire notion of “social media consultation” is deemed laughable by a sizeable portion of the blogosphere as a result.

Social media consultants are painted as know-nothing technology zealots because that’s often who they are, but it’s also because so many of them replace discussions regarding crucial business issues with preachy social media sermons in their “consulting” practices. A few observations:

Many Social Media “Consultants” Are Oblivious to Obvious Business Issues

I’ve done some social media consulting work, not initially as a strategist but originally as a developer for Facebook applications. I got into the business-end of things just because I had an opportunity to get a bird’s-eye view of how various companies are trying to leverage Facebook applications to increase their bottom lines, and to be honest most companies aren’t doing it well.

I think a lot of the people who are “consultants” on social media are just expert users who one or two different social media systems - businesses who hire these sorts of people run into trouble. Expert users, while enthusiastic and sometimes knowledgeable, don’t necessarily understand how to relate specific social media technologies to the business objectives of their clients.

For instance, here’s how an “expert user” might explain social media as a marketing process to a potential new client:

Aside: I’d be surprised if an “expert user” consultant brought up the concept of “touchpoints.”

What is missing from this sample (shitty) business process explanation? Here’s a short list:

• No Budgeting;
• No Strategic Planning;
• No Goals or Milestones;
• No “Analyze and Refine” Stage;
• No Training Phase; and
• Worst of All - No Explanation of How Social Media Integrates into Existing Marketing Activity.

Expert users are experts because they are well-versed in the “execution” part of the business process, but I think they often overlook crucial parts of their clients’ overall business processes. Integration into ongoing marketing efforts is the most important - you don’t  want to waste additional marketing dollars on overlapping activities or not spend dollars on areas where social marketing and ongoing marketing can (buzzword alert) synergize each other.

Many Social Media Consultants Don’t or Can’t Determine the True Dollar Cost of Social Marketing Activities

If my time was worth $25 an hour do you know how much it has cost me to build up Marketing-Ninja’s audience to a size of roughly 400-410 readers? The dollar cost would be somewhere between $5000 and $10000 dollars (200 - 400 hours) over the span of 11 months.

Now if I were sitting down with a new client, an ultra-light air vehicle (ULAV) manufacturer, who wanted to build a blog with 2,000 readers in one year, how could I accurately project the costs of this marketing initiative assuming that the client’s goals are within reach?

If your answer was “estimate cost based on your experiences with your own blog” then you’re incorrect, and this is where “expert users” fail again - at least in some instances. In the rare case where your personal blog’s audience and your client’s desired audience overlap significantly then this answer would be reasonable. However this doesn’t work in the common case, like the example I have described.

Each area of interest or domain is going to have different time/channel/approach requirements in order to successfully build an audience, a fact that is ignored by a lot of social media consultants.

The best approach to budgeting the dollar cost of a long-term marketing project in a new or unfamiliar domain is to simply use a prototype campaign for a short period of time, measure the results, compare results to cost, try to estimate the “liftoff cost” as best as you can, and allow some room for error.

The Clients of Social Media Consultants Don’t Do the Right Things and Make Us Look Bad

I can go on all day about the things that consultants might do wrong, but the clients who hire social media consultants aren’t blameless. Social media consultants are plentiful because the demand for them is high - social media is a hot, new, unconquered marketing channel that few companies have learned to master and therein lies a lot of potential for growth.

However, many companies simply don’t know how to use a social media consultant once they have one - an experienced consultant can tell clients what they need to do in order to have a successful working relationship and subsequently successful marketing campaign, but the consultant can’t force his or her client to listen.

I’m going to write about this at length in the future, but for now let’s just leave it at what I said - you can’t tell your client what you think they need to do, but you can’t force them to do it.

Man… there’s A LOT more stuff I can cover here, but this post is getting lengthy as it is. I think I’m going to cut this off and get back to my last paper I ever have to write before I graduate.

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First, let me apologize for the delay in posting - it’s finals week here at Vanderbilt and I’ve also had a lot of graduation stuff to attend to, but now for the business at hand: the results from my OS X vs. Vista experiment, which I blogged a little bit about on Sunday.

Where We Left Off

The premise of the experiment was to have a hardcore OS X (Leopard) user and a hardcore Vista (Ultimate) user switch computers for a weekend and see how they compared relative to their standard preference. I’m not sure when my friend plans on writing up his experience, but we spent about two hours going over what we liked and didn’t like about each other’s systems.

What I Liked About OS X

The biggest thing that I liked about OS X were all of the little things - automatic detection and configuration, less bubbly notifications than Vista, and so forth. All of those little things add up to being a really nice touch overall. Here are the things that I liked about OS X:

1. Spaces - I really liked being able to stick stuff in the background when I was trying to do work; when I was installing Vista on Parallels I had it sit in the background while I watched Deadliest Catch via EyeTV in the active Space. Being able to have full control over my visual area was pretty nice - the fact that my friend’s MacBook Pro had a 17″ monitor helped too, I might add. My XPS has a much smaller monitor.
2. Automatic Gmail POP3 Configuration in Entourage - I had to set up my Gmail POP3 access by hand in Outlook 2007; in Entourage all I had to do was provide my login information and it figured out the rest for me. While this isn’t a “major feature,” I think it’s a nice touch. Ironically enough, that was Microsoft’s decision - not Apple’s. Correct me if I’m wrong, but when I set up my Gmail account using Apple Mail I’m pretty sure that it also set itself up automatically.
3. Download Integration with Safari - I downloaded a few pieces of software and installed them on my friend’s MacBook Pro; I really liked the fact that when I went to install those pieces of software hours after I downloaded them I received a pop-up notification from OS X letting me know when I had downloaded the file via Safari and warning me that I was about to install it. I thought this was a nice, unintrusive security feature.
4. Automatic Detection of my External Hard Drive as a Possible Backup Device - As soon as I plugged my USB hub into the MacBook Pro OS X detected the external hard drive linked up through the USB hub and asked me if I wanted to use it as a backup location for Time Machine; again, that’s pretty cool. I had to set that drive up manually for Windows Backup.

What I Didn’t Like

I hope you weren’t here for yet-another-glowing-review-of-OS X, because to be honest, I was surprised at not only the lack of software that came out of the box with Leopard but the software that was bundled with Leopard was utterly inadequate at satisfying my business needs. Here’s what I didn’t like about my experience with OS X:

1. Not Enough Software Out of the Box - One of the things that I hear people complain about in a lot of Apple vs. PC rants is the fact that Apples typically cost more - but most of those comparisons only go as far as the price tag of Macs out of the box. Those comparisons typically don’t include all of the other stuff that you have to buy in order to get the same level of usefulness out of a Vista Ultimate machine. For instance, you have to buy EyeTV if you want to get any of the TV tuner functionality that Media Center has, and the biggest irony of all - you have to buy a copy of Windows in order to play most video games on the Mac.
2. No Built-in SharePoint / Shared Document Control Functionality - I complained about this earlier in the week but Office 2008, Safari, and Apple Mail don’t support SharePoint or any other large document versioning/control systems natively. I assume that Microsoft’s didn’t include any SharePoint functionality in Office 2008 intentionally, but that doesn’t explain  I had to install Firefox in order to view one of my client’s web-based SharePoint systems in order to get access to some drafts that I needed for work. If I hear any Apple fans going “OH WELL, YOU CAN USE SVN FOR DOCUMENT CONTROL *HYUCK*” then I am going to scream - SVN works great for coders who feel comfortable using command lines, not typical business people or even most Apple users.
3. No Surprise - Parallels and VMWare S-U-C-K for Gaming - I decided to opt out of installing Half-Life 2 via Parallels since it takes like 6 discs to install and I didn’t want to pay that much attention to the install process; instead I loaded up my copy of Medieval Total War 2, which takes two DVDs to install, and play that on both emulation platforms. The result? I couldn’t get the loader for MTW2 to launch before Parallels threw a “not supported” error; the loader for MTW2 doesn’t even use the game’s graphic engine. When I was told that VMWare was actually worse than Parallels by my roommate, a MacBook gamer, I said “screw this” and stopped my MTW2 installation. All of the hype I’d heard about Parallels didn’t have much substance behind it apparently. Stick to Boot Camp if you want to game.
4. Crashing - I didn’t expect my friend’s MacBook Pro to crash at all when I used it, given that I only used the system for about 12 hours. It crashed twice - the OS didn’t crash, but some of Apple’s other software did. Safari crashed for no apparent reason at one point and in one other instance the Java VM tanked (that’s SUN’s problem.) My counterpart, who used my XPS for the same duration I used his MacBook Pro - reported no crashes whatsoever. This tickled me pink. For the record, the only crashing that I’ve ever experienced on my Vista Ultimate machine are crashes from Firefox and the infamous “Google Desktop Kills WinSock32.dll” incident.
5. EyeTV is Great - Unless You Want to Change the Channel - I thought EyeTV was pretty cool until I had to figure out how to change the channel. Instead of going to the program guide and clicking on the television program that is currently running I have to look at the guide, flip over to a channel screen which doesn’t show the full names of the network (KYWN vs. ABC for instance) and try to remember what was playing on the given channel. I guess when EyeTV was replicating Media Center’s interface it forgot some key usability issues. Side Note: My counterpart didn’t think that Media Center was very usable at all.

Other Thoughts

1. Mono is No .NET 3.5 - I gave Mono a try as was recommended by my readers; I used Monodevelop and all of the native Mono function calls. While I think Mono has come a long way since I first looked into it a couple of years ago, it still has a ways to go before it’s .NET 3.5. Also, the IDE (Monodevelop) reminds me of Eclipse, an IDE that I love to hate.

Overall I thought the MacBook Pro was a decent ride, but it falls short in a lot of key areas (for me, anyway.) Hopefully my counterpart writes up his report soon, although last time I spoke to him about it he said “I’m going to have to try to think of something nice to say about Vista.”

So there goes my challenge. It’s always good to branch out and try new systems, but it looks like my addiction to video games and my need to consume key services provided by Microsoft software has me hooked on Windows.

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Those of you who were paying attention last week might be wondering about the Apple vs. Vista challenge that I threw down. Well, I’m on a Macbook Pro now, I just finished setting up Parallels with a copy of Vista Ultimate, and I’m about to begin some of my work.

I Miss Windows Live Writer…

It was a total pain in the ass for me to find a decent piece of desktop publishing software for the Mac. I’m using the free trial version of ecto now - the interface is clunky, awkward, and doesn’t display the nested structure of my WordPress blog categories like how Windows Live Writer does. I haven’t played around with ecto much, but so far I haven’t found any previewing tools or any of the niceties that I enjoy when I use Windows Live Writer.

Prior to installing ecto I tried a Java-based Bleezer desktop blogging application for OS X; it crashed due to a handful of JVM errors before I got a chance to use it. I promptly tried to use my delete key to remove it from the desktop only to discover that I actually have to drag and drop it into the trash.

Entourage Works, Minus SharePoint

Was able to connect to my gmail account with no problems, but when I tried to see if I could sync to my work’s SharePoint server using Entourage 2008, the same way I would with Outlook 2007, I discovered that Office 2008 simply doesn’t have any SharePoint support.

Oh well.

Safari Works, Minus Web-Based SharePoint

So I couldn’t sync Entourage with SharePoint. No problem - my client has a web-accessible version of SharePoint which I access from my Vista and XP machines regularly, using both Firefox and Internet Explorer 6/7.

When I supplied my credentials using Safari the unthinkable happened - nothing. I tried changing the slash from a forward to a backslash and nothing - it didn’t go through, even with the correct credentials.

What’s the deal here? Why wouldn’t Safari be able to connect to a simple web-based version of SharePoint? All SharePoint uses is just standard HTML/AJAX when I use Firefox to browse it; why wouldn’t Safari work?

EyeTV is Fun

EyeTV works just as well as Windows Media Center’s live TV functionality does; the owner of this laptop had already set up the channel scanning and programming prior to my adoption of the computer so it really didn’t require any effort on my end to get it working.

How My Counterpart is Doing

The hardcore Mac owner whom I switched computers with is just now trying out my XPS; apparently my computer:

• Boots too slowly and
• The screen isn’t bright enough to be read outside at dusk.

Fair enough. More to come later.

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Instead of running a standard feature-by-feature comparison post regarding why I use Vista Ultimate over OS X I’m going to introduce something a bit more fun and fair - the Apple vs. Vista Challenge.

In the process of preparing to write the article that I had intended to publish today I interviewed several of my friends, all Mac users, and asked about feature differences and similarities in my key areas of PC use. When it became clear that I didn’t know enough about OS X and my friends didn’t know enough about Vista, we decided to mix it up.

The Set-Up

My friend and I are going to switch computers for 48 hours - my XPS m1330 for his MacBook - we are going to try to complete routine tasks on the new platform and write our responses as to what was easier and harder with the new platform.

Expertise: I’m a computer science major and by all means an expert Windows user; my friend is a computer engineering major and an expert Tiger/Leopard user. We have roughly equivalent levels of experience with our respective platforms.

Hardware: I will be handing over my Dell XPS m1330 and I will be receiving my friend’s MacBook; we will also be handing over our TV tuners and remotes as part of the experiment. The exact hardware specifications are going to be different but that variable is somewhat out of our control. We’re going to do the best we can.

Use: We’re going to use our new laptops to perform routine tasks - no stress testing and so forth. We’re allowed to install new programs, save files, and do whatever it is that we’d do when faced with a routine task that we commonly perform on our normal systems.

My Tasks:

I’m not sure what my friend plans on doing to my poor XPS, but I’m going to have some fun with his MacBook. Here is what I plan on doing:

1. Routine Office Work
   • Using Mac Office 2008, I’m going to make some changes to my resume formatting, work on some papers, edit a PowerPoint for class, and so forth.
   • I’m also going to use a copy of SmartDraw 2008, which I need to use every day for work. SmartDraw does not have an Apple-compatible version, so I’m going to see if SmartDraw will run using Parallels.
   • I’m going to substitute Entourage for Outlook - I’m also going to try to sync Entourage with my clients’ SharePoint documentation servers, which is something that I routinely use with Outlool.
2. Create a New Blog Entry
   • I have no idea of Windows Live Writer works for the Mac or not so I may need to find a new desktop publishing solutions.
   • I will write and publish one complete blog entry using the MacBook to edit my images, write my copy, and publish.
3. Browsing the Web
   • I plan on using FireFox, which is what I normally use on the PC to begin with.
   • I may give Safari a try, but I’m not that interested to be honest.
4. Programming
   • I’m going to try to write one small program in C++, using GCC or whatever the most convenient/popular C++ solution for Apple systems is.
   • I’m going to try to write one .NET program using Visual C# Studio using Parallels. If there’s a better way of accomplishing this task, let me know.
5. Media
   • Using EyeTV as a substitute for Windows Media Center, I am going to try to record one episode of CSI.
   • I already know, and loathe, iTunes so I’m not going to bother using it.
6. Gaming
   • Using Parallels, I plan on installing Half-Life 2 and playing the first three single player levels. I know this experiment has been performed using Boot Camp with marginal success, but hey, I’ve heard a lot of great things about Parallels and running a 3-year-old game should be a piece of cake.
   • Using Parallels, I plan on playing 1 hour of multi-player Team Fortress Classic 2 - which is also part of the HL2 episode 2 package.
7. Restoration
   • My friend and I are both going to create new accounts and restore points using Windows Restore & Time Machine respectively - these restore points should undue all of the changes made to each other’s systems. At the end of the trial we are going to try to roll back our two machines back to the way they were before we used them - we’ll see how easy this is or is not.

So there it is. Look forward to hearing back from us in 10-14 days with our reports.

del.icio.us Tags: Apple,Apple vs. PC

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This is an article that I’ve wanted to write for a long time, because I want to know if I’m the only person out there who feels this way.

Today I read an article from Computerworld called “Five Reasons Why Vista Beats OS X;” the article made a pathetically weak case for Vista and incited the ire of the blogosphere. As an aside, I plan on doing my own “Vista vs. OS X” post later this week simply because the case for Vista was made so poorly by Preston Galla and I think the issue would be a lot of fun to write about.

However, back to the point: the blogosphere’s reaction. Social media and blogs are dominated by Apple fans for the most part; this truth is so observable that I feel comfortable saying it without backing it up with statistics.

I look at some of the reactions from Mac users and groan; many of the pro-Windows comments on Digg have been buried and angry Mac users even tarnished the article’s rating within Computerworld’s own internal rating system:

-184? The article was not well-reasoned, but come on! My gut tells me that most of those votes came from the same sort of pissed-off Mac acolytes who buried Pro-Windows comments on Digg.

Kevin Maney says it best:

Here’s something I know from experience: Dis Apple or Steve Jobs publicly, even in a mild way, and the Apple Cultists descend on you like the zombies in Dawn of the Dead. Or maybe the flying monkeys in Wizard of Oz. You get the picture. Nail Apple in a public forum, and you can depend on your in box filling with nasty-grams from dot-mac addresses.

The Cult of Apple

I admire Apple for being able to build a product and a brand that people feel connected to at a deeply emotional level; Apple users are among the most vocal and passionate customers across all industries.

Apple users, as I have claimed before, proudly boast their brand preference with “colorful” displays of passion, such as web celebrity iJustine’s “Apple” tattoo:

If you’re not at least a little creeped out by that video then you’re probably a Mac user.

And this is what I’m getting at: are Apple fans a little bit too passionate, a little too deep in the product myopia?

An example: one of my college friends was among the first group of people to get an iPhone, and he has not stopped talking about the iPhone since. Every single meeting with him means that I have to spend at least 5 minutes watching him perform some mundane task on his iPhone or watch some lame YouTube video on his tiny screen.

Within a few weeks of owning an iPhone he started to make fun of his other friends and I for using Razors, Treos, and so forth. Nothing, however, topped his attempt to pick up girls at bars by showing them his iPhone; a few of my other friends and I stood back and watched, all of us thinking “an iPhone would be cool were it not adopted by people like who think that an iPod with a touch screen and 2g wireless will get girls into the sack.”

The Apple Community: A Sales Deterrent?

Apple acquires new customers (”converts”) every day, but something about buying a Mac transforms many of those customers into smug, annoying jack asses.

I and others like me will never buy a Mac product other than iPod just because we don’t want to be associated with the same sort of smug “know-it-all” fanboys who try to pick up women at bars using an iPhone!

This post isn’t about “why I use Windows” or “why I think Windows is better than Macs;” it’s “I won’t buy Mac products because I think Mac users represent a social movement that is profoundly annoying and I think I’m not alone on this one.”

Are there people who don’t buy Mac products because they don’t want to be in the community, and are there enough of them to curb Apple’s growth?

You tell me.

del.icio.us Tags: Apple,Marketing

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A few weeks ago I received a friend request on StumbleUpon from a dude named Andy MacDonald who runs an SEO/Meta-Blog called Swift Media UK.

The day after I accepted his friend request I received a Stumble from Andy, asking me to read over one of his new blog articles about “engaging your readers” or something. My first response to stranger who starts sending me stumbles to their own site is usually to remove them from my friends list.

In this instance I decided that it might be fun to see if he’d give a piece of my content a Stumble, mostly to see how he responds to his own medicine.

Sure enough, I got a Stumble back. Within a few days, I got another Stumble request. I haven’t Stumbled any of Andy’s pages since, and I’ve actually got a bit of a back-up going on my StumbleBar (pictured below:)

All of those are from Andy; those requests have all come over the past week and a half.

So here’s my question; isn’t what Andy’s doing, adding people as friends and flinging off Stumble requests, fundamentally wrong? Isn’t the entire point of StumbleUpon to share interesting content with your friends, not to promote your own content using strangers?*

And what if Andy and I sent each other Stumble requests on a regular basis for the sake of helping each other acquire more traffic? Wouldn’t this be an instance of reciprocal stumbling, which is against the StumbleUpon Terms of Service?

My Burning Question

The reason I even bother writing this post, is because it looks like whatever Andy’s doing: it works.

He’s got a great amount of traffic, comments, and hell, he’s even doing some guest blogging for Blogging Tips.

So here’s my burning question: should everyone get into the act? Should I start telling my corporate clients to friend people with interests that fall into my client’s business domains and start firing off Stumble requests? Will that help bring in traffic? Engaged readers?

What do you think? Is everything that Andy’s doing fine? Does it work?

Update:

Here are a few responses from readers.

From Tom’s Tech Blog: Dishonest Traffic Boosting

From System Zero: Should You Stumble Yourself?

*Disclosure: I’ve sent Stumble requests to some of my friends before when I thought that they would be legitimately interested in what I had to say, but I don’t do it often.I haven’t even used the service much in 2008.

*Disclosure: I’ve outright tried this practice before, with people who I thought might be interested in the content, and felt guilty doing it, hence why I’m surprised when other bloggers don’t feel some shame when doing it.

del.icio.us Tags: StumbleUpon,Social Media,Self Promotion

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This is a sample post from my Field Guide to Social Marketing.

I was reading up on DotNetKicks when I came across the most interesting headline I have ever seen on the site, “How YOUR tech blog posts are RIPPED OFF while you sleep!”

The post comes from Mike Duncan, a C# blogger, who discovered that a piece of his hard work was more or less stolen by InfoQ (rel=no follow; no PageRank+1 for you,) a developer-oriented news site.

To give you a quick summary of what the issue is in this instance:

TWO DAYS after my post[, “SQLite on .NET - Get up and Running in 3 Minutes”] was out in the wild, I started seeing some interesting inbound links coming in from InfoQ, a tech news - paid story aggregator type site. While not somewhere I go often, their site is indeed large, thriving, and as it turns out, morally bankrupt. It seems that one Robert Bazinet has a story on the front page of the 250,000 unique visitors per month, page rank 7, mega-site that is InfoQ.com cleverly titled “Up and Running with SQLite on .NET in 3 Minutes.”

So what do you do if you’re Mike Duncan? Someone else is profiting from your own content and you’re not getting adequate credit or compensation?

There are four options:

• Do Nothing
• Do Little
• Send in the Lawyers
• Raise Hell

Option 1 - Don’t Do Anything

If your content has been totally stolen, 100% stolen with 0% credit given to you in any way, shape, or form then please don’t bother reading this; you need to get SOME credit before you even consider doing this. However, in the case of Mike Duncan, he did get a link back, some referral traffic, and a little bit of name recognition, even though he still wasn’t given the appropriate amount of credit.

Are you happy seeing your words get out there, regardless of whom they are attributed to? Enjoying some of the minor referral traffic? Then don’t do anything.

Option 2 - Do Little

Pretty self-explanatory. Do it yourself and contact the author and ask that they respect your original work and give you the proper level of credit.

Option 3 - Send in the Lawyers

Sending in the lawyers simply isn’t an option for most bloggers or small organizations.

Here’s a quick decision tree which will help you decide whether or not it’s worth calling up some intellectual property lawyers:

This decision tree may be a little hard to read so I’ve included a full-sized version of this image here. Basically if the costs of pursuing legal actions are greater than the benefits, don’t do it.

Another thing to consider, though, is will legal action nip plagiarism from your site in the bud entirely or does it do nothing to prevent it from happening again in the future?

Option 4 - Raise Hell

This is the option I recommend for content owners who have already tried the “Do Little” option and don’t have the means to pursue the “Send in the Lawyers” option.

The objective of this option is to create enough noise and ill will towards the plagiarizer that the cost of not responding becomes greater than the value created by plagiarizing your content.

That being said, here are a few ways that you can go about “raising hell” when someone steals your content:

Again, this Mind Map is probably pretty hard to read, thus I’ve attached a full-sized version of the image here.

Does this “raise hell” option seem a little immature, pedantic perhaps? Yes, but it’s effective.

Technorati Tags: Plagiarism,Field Guide to Social Marketing

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I picked up a fantastic article from BizSugar today called “Facebook’s Growing Problem,” written by The Branding Strategy Blog. They wrote:

Cool brands are like a vacuum, nature abhors them. The cooler they get, the more attractive they become to the uncool and the harder they have to fight to retain their hip customer base.

This is the big problem for Facebook.

and

After 18 months, high-school kids could join the site. Finally, in September 2006, the doors were officially opened to anyone, anywhere in the world.

That is the point at which Facebook signed away its soul. It might be cool new media, but the oldest rules of marketing still apply. Some customers don’t like other customers. For all their bright new-century appeal, the founders of Facebook have a case of old-fashioned sales orientation. It should have hired a proper marketer to ensure that the wrong members didn’t ruin its brand. Unfortunately, it is now too late: the fat bastards are drinking at the bar.

I definitely encourage that you read the full of text “Facebook’s Growing Problem” text in its entirety.

This is one of the things that I’ve most certainly thought, given that I have been a Facebook member since I was a college freshman in August 2004.

The day my younger brother, a senior in high school, signed up in late 2006 was the day I started thinking that Facebook may not be so cool after all.

Years later, I started receiving my first spam messages from my University and people who don’t even know me. Facebook should have left the fat bastards out after all if it was interested in retaining its primary audience I suppose.

What are your thoughts?

Technorati Tags: Facebook,Branding

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This is a sample post from my Field Guide to Social Marketing.

One of the things that I’ve been recommending to my marketing clients, and one of the things that I did for Marketing Ninja today, is to have a brainstorming session where you determine what you’re going to write about and what you’re going to say to your readers in the long run.

There are a number of ways of doing this, but I think the easiest way to get organized is to use a Mind Map.

I’ve written about using Mind Maps before in the context of project organization.

Why Would I Want to Use a Mind Map?

A Mind Map is just one tool for organizing your business’ online message; there are a lot of options available, but I find that mind maps are better because:

• They are easier to read than bulleted lists;
• They are better for brain storming;
• They are much more interesting than bullets if you have to present your blogging ideas in a PowerPoint presentation;
• They are much more spatially efficient since you can branch out your ideas horizontally (lists grow mostly vertically;) and
• Mind Maps let you see what you’re thinking; bulleted lists don’t convey the same ideas with the clarity that a mind map has.

In addition, with a really good diagramming tool, you can actually build a mind map faster than you can outline it. I consult for SmartDraw so I use SmartDraw 2008.

How Do I Use A Mind Map To Organize My Company’s Online Message?

Let me show you what I did for Marketing Ninja.

Step 1. Start with a Few Initial “Big Topics”

I picked what I consider to be the three core areas that I write about:

• Social Media for Business;
• Trends in Social Media; and
• Social Media Technology.

Notice that I highlighted Social Media Technology with a different color; this is primarily because my blogging activity in that area is declining and I am moving more towards the marketing/social media focus.

Step 2. Refine Each “Big Topic” with a few Specific “Areas of Interest”

So I took my original list and expanded on each node with a few increasingly specified sub-topics; here’s what my Mind Map would look like in outline format:

• Social Media for Business
  • Blogging for Business
  • Field Guide to Social Marketing
  • Reference Guides
• Trends in Social Media
  • Etiquette
  • Niche Portals v. Digg
  • YHOO v. MSFT
  • GOOG v. MSFT
• Social Media Technology
  • ASP.NET
  • Design
  • Web 2.0
  • DBMS

See how I have much more space to get my information across when I have a Mind Map? Now we’re going to take it one step further.

Step 3. Refine, Add More Subtopics, Then Repeat

This chart is obviously too large to be read on the relatively narrow viewing pane of this blog, so you can see a full sized version of this image here. A bulleted list with this much content would be virtually unreadable, but a Mind Map is relatively manageable.

Basically all you do is you keep iterating through subtopics until you have covered the full set of possible topics. At that point you now have a Mind Map artifact that you can refer to when you want to write a new post but aren’t sure what direction to use.

Step 4. When Publishing New Content, Refer Back to the Mind Map

Does your content stay within the range of topics that you brainstormed using your Mind Map? If not then you may want to refine your idea until it does, your perhaps reevaluate the topics you explored during your brainstorming session.

Another possibility: do you need something to write about? Refer back to the mind map; after all, that’s where you can see your ideas whenever you’re suffering from writer’s block.

Getting your content’s messages organized is crucial to having a successful blogging campaign, and a mind map is a pretty good starting point for coming up with ideas and presenting them in a manner that is easy to communicate.

Downloads:

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [SmartDraw 2008 Format, Editable]

Marketing Ninja Full Mind Map [PDF Format, Read-Only]

Technorati Tags: Field Guide to Social Marketing,Mind Mapping

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