Paul Dunay Interviewed on "Be The Voice" Blog with David Spark

For episode number seven of “Be the Voice” David Spark talked with Paul Dunay, Global Director of Integrated Marketing at BearingPoint and prominent blogger at Buzz Marketing for Technology.

Here are some of the highlights from David's interview with me:

Summary

• The blog is the new resume
• Starting a personal/professional blog can be your social media sandbox. Play with it and learn the tricks and traps before you launch something within your organization.
• If you work at a large organization, you’re going to need to some corporate blogging guidelines. There are tons.
• You want to grow your audience so write content to elicit conversation, not act as the voice of G-d telling people what’s right and wrong.
• Pick your platform wisely. You don’t want to run into a situation where you’re on one platform (e.g. Blogger) and want to switch to another (e.g. WordPress) and you’re hesitant because the change in addressing will cause you to lose your “Google juice.”
• The best way to get a blog audience is to follow the people you want following you.
• When hosting a podcast, ask questions that will elicit honest responses to experiences rather than the talking points marketing wants to hit.
• Veotag allows you to take advantage of podcasts’ shortcomings by bookmarking chapters throughout your program.
• Know what’s on your audience’s minds and follow the news and the trends. To grab an audience always try to hook your editorial with the day’s headlines.

Read the entire article and listen to the interview with Paul Dunay [27:45m].

 

Social Networking: Expanding Beyond the Youth Market and into Business - a podcast with Dotster’s Catherine Brown

Starting up a social network to support any business can be a challenge. These days it seems that there are a variety of new social networks popping up all over. To that end I have heard a new acronym YASN (Yet Another Social Network)!

But to fill this demand many new social network software’s and asp’s are being created to fill the business need. Recently Dotster introduced a new product for not only their clients but of clients beyond their control.

The idea that Social Networking is moving beyond the youth market to business isn’t new but the idea is how and what are people doing to get them to join and what content are they providing to keep them engaged.

Listen to Catherine’s ideas on how to get your own community going as well as keep them coming back for more.



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About Catherine

Catherine Brown, Director of Enterprise Social Networking, Dotster, Inc., has over 14 years experience in marketing and product promotions and has a successful track record at both large and small firms. At Calista, an IP Telephony start-up, she was part of an executive team that took the company to acquisition by Cisco. While at Cisco, she managed major product launches and million dollar promotional campaigns, worked on a company-wide website redesign and started a web analytics program. She has also been an entrepreneur. Catherine has a BA from Stanford, an MBA from UC Berkeley, and has lived in Europe and Latin America (she speaks both French and Spanish).

 

Is Podcasting Social Media?

So, I got asked this question on a call today with a fellow social media expert and I just had to blog about the ensuing conversation.

In reality if you look at the Latin origins of the word social it would most likely have a definition akin to the free give and take of conversation and collaboration amongst multiple parties. Slap on the word media and that ensures it is some form of digital media these days.

So with this as a backdrop the answer would logically be – NO!

A podcast is a new media. A podcast is a new channel. But it is still at the end of the day a one way dialog – you listen to one or two people having a conversation. If you were listening to two people having a conversation at a party are you being social? I think not – its only when you get involved in the conversation does it become social.

So just how social are podcasts?

Take it from me, I have personally recorded and handed edited over 100 podcasts for this blog and other purposes and I can safely say they don’t get the level of interactivity (read comments) like my regular old blog posts do. Yes there is that element of “portability” meaning you can take a podcast anywhere and listen to it any time – but do people really do that?? The answer there is also NO. I find my listeners tend to consume the media right when they find it. Which is why I go through the trouble of tagging my podcasts with Veotag so folks can listen to only the relevant question or 2, get in – get out and on to the next thing. People are busy and you can read faster than you can listen!

So does that spell the end of podcasts?

No way, I got a little nervous when I saw PodTech get sold for $500,000 but think podcasts can be very useful in delivering messages – just realize going in you aren’t really doing social media by doing a bunch of podcasts. Does this mean I will stop my podcast series? – no, I enjoy it too much to stop!

So what’s your view – is podcasting social media to you?

 

Command & Control Branding: Not Dead Yet?

For years, classic brand strategy has always been about the creation of a single message that can be used with all of your constituents; investors, employees, senior management and customers about who you are and what value your company provides. Brand managers tend to write it up and paste it on every wall and train every new recruit in it. It’s a classic approach to command and control brand messaging which then gets deployed via all the traditional media and used in every communications channel.

But these days you hear a lot of discussions about the explosion of new media types and formats like RSS feeds, blogs, podcasts, video, communities, micro-blogging and other emerging forms of social media. And it is causing plenty of concern that this disruption of media is eroding the traditional command and control branding that has become such common place for marketers.

Well, I say hallelujah and good riddance!

I believe that there is a very compelling argument that media doesn’t have to be fragmented while at the same time the message need not be command and control anymore. It is only a matter of knowing how to orchestrate it.

This is why a recent BusinessWeek article on Ford surprised me so much. Ford hired a very talented marketer away from Toyota named James Farley (FYI - cousin of the late Chris Farley). Farley has been doing a masterful job on several levels: he has built/is building a dream team of marketers, making product managers be wholly accountable for individual product launches (like the new Flex) and then building the kind of consensus around a new brand message that some of us can only dream of, bringing in key dealership owners to help with the final message selection. But in the end he came away with a new brand message of -- Ford: Drive One.

Nice but … It’s a one way message, like Nike: Just do it. There is no conversation in there. How can I have a conversation with a brand that is ordering me to drive one of their vehicles?

In agonizing about our new brand message – New Thinking for a Changing World. I knew I could build content and harness the power of the organization around it. I never would have felt comfortable going to the market with a message like BearingPoint: Just do it!

So here is the secret.

First, the brand manager needs to architect a single theme that can be used across all media traditional or otherwise. Notice here I didn’t say command and control at all – just to create a theme that is broad enough to use across every aspect of your media plan and “invite” customers and prospects to “engage” with it.

Next, you need to give your customers and prospects the digital tools to comment, to interact, and to add to the conversation. Then you add in more traditional elements of a media plan that all point to the online conversation and you will end up supercharging your media plan!

The bottom line is your customers and prospects are perhaps the most savvy engaged technology users of any buyer in any industry. You can’t expect to reach them with just traditional media only anymore, you need to deliver your message in a way that is targeted to their exact interests. So why not get out there where they talking about your product or service, and give them a conversation starter along with the permission to start a dialog with your brand!

 

For Social Media, Reach is found in the Long Tail!

When it comes to Social Media there has been tons of talk about those few influencers who are able to spread your message like wild fire. But finding those few influencers has been the proverbial challenge.

Several good books have been written about this topic by some really smart people. But when doing some data mining on my blog using a new tool called SM2 from Techrigy (special thanks to them for helping me get trained on this tool), I noted that the far reaching impact of my blog is found in the proverbial Long Tail. (see graphic)

What this says is that the conversation about topics on my blog and where they are occurring is coming from the long tail (dang it, that Chris Anderson is right again!)

So what I think this means is that exclusively looking for reach with your social media initiatives by targeting a selected few influencers is a flawed concept (sorry Ed Keller from WOMMA). To me this graph says it needs to also contain a component that delivers adoption (ie Reach) through the Long Tail of bloggers out there.

The bottom line is Social Media is fluid so you might as well go with the flow!

 

Psychology of Buzz Marketing – a podcast with Jim Calhoun, CEO of Popular Media

Why are some Buzz Marketing programs better than others?

What makes one program more Buzz worthy than another?

These questions and more are why I interviewed Jim Calhoun the CEO of Popular Media for his advice on how to really make your Buzz Marketing programs engaging.

So what’s Jim’s advice on how to make good decisions when it comes to Viral or Buzz Marketing?

Two tenets - Make it fun to share and Make it fun to get – this is a base minimum for any Buzz program. To hear more of his advice on how to make your campaigns go viral check out our podcast.



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About Jim

Jim co-founded PopularMedia and has served as chief executive officer since its inception in 2003. He is responsible for guiding the company's strategy, growth, operations and customer satisfaction. A true Silicon Valley veteran, Jim has helped a broad range of businesses grow through technology and marketing -- from startups such as Glam Media, Inc. to global leaders such as HP and IBM. Prior to founding PopularMedia, Jim founded CustomerClick LLC, a privately held direct marketing services firm based in San Francisco. Previously, Jim served as Vice President of Products at NetObjects, Inc. Jim is a former reviews editor at CNET and holds a degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri.