One of my must-reads is Brian Solis’ blog, and having had the pleasure to meet Brian at BlogWorld Expo a couple of months ago, I found him to be a pretty modest, smart and very funny guy.

In his latest post, “Inbound Marketing:  Get Found,” he reviews the book of the same name written by  Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah of HubSpot.  Often, the most sophisticated observations and the most simple and elegant.  I have not yet read the book (but am putting it on my Kindle list now), but I love the concepts laid out in Brian’s review:

This book is an exceptional guide to understanding the landscape of creating and maximizing presence. Inbound Marketing refers to the act of consumers discovering your brand through various forms of online media, without your direct engagement necessarily. In the interactive Web, I refer to this practice as SMO or Social Media Optimization – the art and science of escalating the findability of social objects within social networks and the blogosphere.

My dos centavos?  This is directly in line with my personal experience.  I suppose that it my own way, I have built a mini-marketing effort simply by establishing and maintaining a presence, first in blogs, and later in Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, del.icio.us and now on Posterous — which I am still playing with but I think has a lot of potential.

My biggest surprise and evidence of all of this was, without trying, I found myself on top of the Google search rank for “Mark Story.”  I have a somewhat unusual name, but there are numerous other Mark Storys — a Kentucky sportswriter, a programmer (with the mark-story.com domain), a photographer and some a**hole who is parking the markstory.com domain and is probably a cyber-squatter.

How did I climb to the top of Google?  By honestly attempting to engage people in online dialogue, and hopefully offering something of value.  I simply did things that I love, played with new tools and gadgets that interest me, and whammo-bammo, there I was with a stream of inbound marketing.  By no means do I consider myself an “A-Lister,” (I would say “D-Lister, but Kathy Griffin makes my skin crawl), but I have received offers to speak, opportunities to freelance write, podcasting fun as well as my latest gig, a correspondent to what I think is the best podcast out there for social media, For Immediate Release.

Again, I have not read the book — but will – but it seems to me that if one is genuine and dogged, if you do indeed build a better inbound marketing mousetrap, the social media world will beat a path to your door.

And Brian, being about a million times smarter than me, provided a quote for the book that nails it on the head:

In the social Web, we are presented with a privilege to establish meaningful dialogue and collaborative relationships with the people who define our markets. This is an incredible opportunity to establish relevance and discoverability. Remember, consumers have choices. We’re not part of those decisions where we’re not present. Inbound marketing serves as the bridge between those seeking information, direction and insight and those willing to provide guidance and support.

So be your own best marketing guru and provide an inbound path for marketing opportunities – without even trying.

Mark

Reprinted from a Media Bullseye article I wrote that was published on May 18, 2009.

The Spice Girls are, in my book, perhaps the worst band of the last century (sorry, fans), but I invoke the name of one of their more tortuous songs to talk about measurement.

This article has been bouncing around in my head since the “For Immediate Release” call-in show on April 25, 2009. The guests were Chip Griffin, CEO of CustomScoop (disclosure: a sponsor of The Hobson and Holtz report); and Aaron Weber, Insight Manager at Spiral16. (further disclosure: I am paid to write this article by Media Bullseye, a sister company of Custom Scoop.)
The guests described a variety of topics, including what constitutes good social media measurement and when it gets “creepy,” meaning you might make a Tweet complaining about a product and then hear from either the products’ representatives or perhaps a competitor. At that point, I had not encountered any “creepiness,” aside from a comment on my blog from Comcast after I took on DirecTV.

The lively podcast (and call-in) discussion got me thinking about “what I really, really want” out of a monitoring service. I have blogged and written articles about measurement and the ensuing steps your
can take for online reputation management ad nauseam, but I have a new wrinkle to add to the discussion:

1. Capturing the right information from the right sources is just the first step, but
   adding context to content is the next, critical step that many monitoring services lack; and

2. Those who do offer some sort of analysis of blogs posts, media mentions and not even
   tweets are often “hired guns” who lack the ability to ascertain the nuances that make a mention, positive, negative or neutral, let alone a favorability ranking. You can’t tell me that someone sitting in another office who has 10 other clients can know more about your issues than you.

The Conundrum

• Are those who do monitoring, either inside or outside of organizations, looking at
  the right thing to measure? and

• Are the right people actually doing the measurement?

My answer is: a) sometimes, and b) not really.

My public relations measurement uber-hero is Katie Paine, whose book “Measuring Public Relationships” is still the best read out  there on the topic, and I am going to borrow liberally from her book in order to help make sense of this.

What to look at

There are two types of horrendous monitoring, one worse than the other. The first is a “clips report” simply regurgitating a bunch of stories without providing any frame of reference to what it all means.

Lame.

What is still bad, but marginally better, is measuring “impressions.” Impressions are a made-up number that is still imprecise. Some organizations say it is 2.7 times the circulation number (counting pass-alongs) and some say it is simply the circulation number itself. This concept is fundamentally flawed as well because just because your article appears, it is a not a lock that the number of people
who see a publication = the number of people that you reached. This is at best flawed, and at worst, downright lazy. Still lame.

Non-Lame-ness

Here’s the Katie Paine part that, when I first read it (and then taught it) was one of those serene moments in which the universe makes sense. She offers up a simple way to measure the messages that actually get through to your audiences. Does it matter how many people buy the publication that your earned media piece runs in? Hell, no. But does matter how many people actually saw the message(s) that you were attempting to convey? Hell, yes.

Katie elegantly calls this revelatory statistic “Cost Per Message Communicated,” meaning that when you cut through all of the (lazy) monitoring mumbo-jumbo, the simplest and most precise way to determine the value of the public relations effort you have undertaken is to a) capture the right information an b) measure the messages that were available to your audiences.

I’ll talk more about this in the second article, but what I “really, really want” is a monitoring system (technology AND subject-matter experts) who will:

1. Capture all of the print, radio, television, blog, online news, Twitter and message
   board stuff that is said about my organization or issue;
2. Separate the “wheat from the chaff” and let me know – concisely – what I need to pay attention to; and
3. Help me understand the value of my public relations, public affairs or even crisis communications outbound messaging – not the “thump test” of number of publications or impressions, but how many of my key messages reached their intended audiences.

If you read this blog semi-regularly, you’ll note that I occasionally fill in for Chip Griffin as a co-host on Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable. It’s always fun and we always have a few laughs.  And I always learn something.

Yesterday, however, I did my best to stay on top my game, because our host was the esteemed Neville Hobson, he of the “For Immediate Release” fame. And of the thought-provoking Neville Hobson blog. And a bunch of other smart, interesting projects evidence by his 4,053 Twitter followers.

With a guest who has forgotten more about podcasting that I will ever know, I have to admit that I was a little nervous.  Have a listen and see if you think I pulled it off. And if the Roundtable folks had conducted random drug testing (read: Manny Ramirez) I would have been banned from the show because I managed to throw myself down a flight of stairs the day prior – and was in a slight percocet/flexoril/celebrex/neck brace haze.

Hope I did you guys proud, Jen and Chip. Or maybe I’m better when I’m higher than a kite? Jen Zingsheim sums things up much better than I can — her summary is below.

Mark

This week, Jen Zingsheim was joined by co-host extraordinaire Mark Story, and the very special guest was Neville Hobson, from the UK–of FIR podcast fame. The Roundtable discussed the recent results of a survey of FIR listeners, the World According to Mom blog-tag effort, and whether PR is suffering a slowdown borne of the recession, or if there are other reasons for budget declines.

Click here to listen to the 39-minute discussion.

• First, the Roundtable spent quite a bit of time discussing the results of the FIR survey, calling out some noteable findings. Jen was surprised at the gender split (77 percent of FIR listeners are men), and Mark offered his thoughts as someone who took the survey. Neville provided a lot of insight as to why they collect this information–and why they make it publicly available.
• Next, as Mother’s Day is this Sunday (still time to get flowers and a card, and don’t forget to call mom!) the group discussed Catherine Connors of Her Bad Mom, and the effort to “go around the world in 80 clicks.” This effort linking mom bloggers across the globe demonstrates the international power of community, and the ability to link to one another through a shared experience–motherhood–in addition to shared interests.
• Finally, the group touched on an article that ran in the New York Times about PR facing a downturn during the recession. Is the recession really the reason for a decline in business, or is this a correction, and does it take into account the introduction of new tools, such as social media?

Click here to listen to the 39-minute discussion.

I had my usual blast subbing for Chip Griffin on the Media Bullseye Radio Roundtable today. I always learn something, and today is was from special guest Beth Harte, from The Harte of Marketing blog. Since I am feeling lazy today, I’ve “pirated” (that word is popular these days) the content from the page on Media Bullseye, but you should check it out.

The Roundtable discussed the Domino’s crisis response (or lack thereof) in light of some creative teens, the timing of the rise of social media, and the inadvertent “brandjacking” by capturing publicly-available content.

Click here to listen to the 33-minute discussion.

• First item for discussion was the video of two Domino’s employees, the critcism of the company’s response, and the ensuing fallout: is this a lesson in where social media can head? From crowd-sourcing the detective work on, it’s an interesting case. The Roundtable also covered issues related to this topic, including the roles and responsibilities of the corporation verses the franchises–Beth points out both should be monitoring, each for different reasons–and the increasing importance of an accelerated response time.

• Next, Pandemic Blog had a piece that makes the link between the rise of social media with the decline in the economy, surmising that it was necessary to turn to social media when “bloated” advertising budgets got cut. The Roundtable participants are skeptical of this linkage, and Mark Story points out that Ashton Kutcher being the first person to get 1 million followers on Twitter could be a sign of the Apocolypse.

• Finally, Geoff Livingston had a post about being “brandjacked by Seesmic”–while Geoff clearly was okay with this use, the piece itself raises some interesting questions about our rights to content we post in public spaces. Does the way that our content is reused matter–if it’s positive, it’s okay, if it’s negative, it’s not okay? Beth asks if we’re heading towards the same scenario for images as we’ve seen for music, that all digital content will be protected. Mark manages to compare Geoff’s description of his situation to the Allysa Milano photo controversy a few years back.

Click here to listen to the 33-minute discussion.

I love doing things I love.  Sounds simplistic, but I am coming to realize that the more things you do in life that bring you joy, the less time you have for stuff you hate.

So yesterday was gut-busting fun, sitting in for uber-media-magnate Chip Griffin on the Media Bullseye Roundtable. Details are here, but with Jenn Zingsheim and the bourbon-swilling, thought-provoking, risen-from-the-dead Jason Falls, the 41 minutes flew past.  It felt like the three of us were sitting at happy hour or doing a drive-time yuk-it-up radio show.

So thank you Chip, Jen and Jason.  Consider me your Joan Rivers Permanent Guest Host any time you want.

Mark