Digital Marketing And Social Media PR – The Future Buzz

You probably already know marketer and communications pro Valeria Maltoni.  She keeps the very popular Conversation Agent blog, a must-read for marketing professionals, where she discusses marketing, social media, PR and quite frequently the intersections of those topics.

As Valeria and I frequently have conversations both publicly and via email, I thought it would be interesting to directly ask her some questions for readers here as we cover many of the same topics.  She was kind enough to agree to participate in a brief Q&A on the subjects we’re both passionate about:

1.  You created a list of marketing professionals at agencies that “walk the talk.”  I think this is a great idea, as what kind of consulting can you possibly provide if you aren’t involved yourself?  To get to the question – what do you think of companies or bloggers who are involved but don’t manage to attract readers or attention?  Do you think they are truly qualified to provide consulting without success?

Finding ways to involve the community you are working on attracting is important. I don’t know if I figured out the magic or sweet spot, yet. While I get a lot of links and retweets and people tell me my content changes the way they work, I don’t get a lot of comments at my blog – never have. To the harried reader, that may seem like lack of engagement.

There is also another issue at play, and that is the difference between creating engaging content for learning and sharing, and going the extra step of being deliberate about spurring people into action. If you have worked on projects for clients, you know that at the end of the day, they request that activity be correlated to results. That requires much more clarity as to what you want to achieve and how to get there.

I have been in situations where agencies were telling me about social media and they didn’t even test some of the tools themselves. The danger is that they’ll recommend what is comfortable to the client – which is often trying to commercialize the social Web instead of socializing what they do. There’s a big difference. We’re not just talking about new channels for the same old push message. By now we should all agree on that.

2.  It’s 2009, and amazingly social media is still new to many business and industries, when socializing and communications on the web are nothing new at all.  From your experiences, what are your subjective insights on the business world’s digital divide?  How fast are we making progress, and what can we do to help bridge the gap that we aren’t doing already?

Even when you have tech savvy people at the top in organizations, you may not have a clear understanding of the role of marketing to shape the business, and not just as an afterthought. Philip Kotler said it best when he stated that there are two kinds of CEOs, those who know they don’t understand marketing, and those who don’t.

Digital media and the democratization that occurred and is taking place in publishing, creating, and collaboration has opened the door to much more than just new channels. It’s amazing to see how many are still resistant to joining the digital space by saying it’s a waste of time, or waiting for it to go away. It isn’t. It won’t. I agree that it’s hard to add yet another dimension to daily workload – that of depth (links) and search (findability). Yet, talking about SEO is the new sexy. Recently I spoke at a sales training program and asked people to write it down – search is 5% of Web strategy, the rest is valuable content.

Many businesses erroneously think that when they’re ready with their message, the world will stop and pay attention to them. Chances are that’s not going to work. Social media is very tactile, and businesses are made of people. We’re social animals. Even as we talk about technology, there are people at the end of that tweet, or blog post. One of the ways I found effective in creating a sense of urgency for the business is by showing who else is there, who’s talking about them and their product or service. Then it becomes a race like that to the moon when the USSR seemed to be getting there first.

3.  Are we really still printing newspapers?  It seems so arcane, wasteful and inefficient.  Digital content is superior in every format, it can be archived forever, it’s social and instant.  I’ve made it no secret that’s my perspective.  So the question for you is simple:  print news – relevant or irrelevant?

There’s a place for print. It’s not going to work in the current, tired format though. Newspapers have been the delivery mechanism for ads and circulars. Those are the waning economics – readers never paid for the news. The new print is about packaging content worthy of being collected, complete with notes in the margins. I wrote it recently, before talking about news, we need to be smart about creating the desire for news.

The 24/7 social networks reels have taken the edge off getting news into our hands quickly. Now we crave for the back story, the updates, the community facts, what happens next. Most importantly, we’re missing the longstanding facts, those that ground us and give us the ability to make up our own mind. What’s irrelevant is the desire to delegate decisions and consequences. I might be getting a bit off topic here, but we are the media now as well. There’s some accountability that comes with that.

4.  The marketing industry as a whole seems to have a fascination with Twitter (I’ve personally tried to keep my conversations about it to a minimum).  Twitter is a great tool and certainly useful, but do you agree the conversations about it are getting absurd?  What can we do as bloggers to elevate the larger social marketing conversations in our industry beyond merely Twitter, or really any specific tools?

Twitter is the Britney Spears of social media tools. It’s fashionable to speak about it even for those who don’t have a clue as to what really happens with it. We like to watch in fascination and get distracted easily by discussions of tools. That’s because strategy is really hard to do. Strategy forces us to think through how we know we got to our objectives.

For example, I recently started building an integrated content conversation across new media outposts and realized that it’s not so easy to do for a business, because you’ll find out there are holes. You’re missing substance to share in some places, or the bandwidth and commitment to create in others. The traditional campaign took care of that by making you see the creative and the tactics as a finite number of items all neatly tied with a bow. That’s no longer effective. You don’t do a one hundred day campaign, you’re always on in some respect. That’s why marketers focus on the tools.

Plus, many bloggers have done the same to get attention – and traffic. So Britney Spears behavior was rewarded. We need to start talking about concrete action that leads to change in behavior and persuasion, which give us results. In other words, more agent, a little less conversation.

5.  I would argue that you don’t need a social media expert, you need a good marketer.  My argument is that a basic requirement of marketing is comprehension in how society communicates and the tools used – which the current and future is web-based communications.  Do you agree that this shouldn’t be in a silo, and comprehension of digital marketing is a standard requirement for all marketers to succeed?

Marketers have had a nice ride with mass communication. Now that they’re facing mass commoditization, they need to go back to their roots in sociology, psychology, anthropology, and ethnographics. There’s no escaping the reality – we deal with people, and as humans we’re unpredictably fickle.

This is probably more true of the American consumer who has grown up on a steady diet of marketing. Back when I was reading a lot more fiction, I was getting a chuckle out of American writers. One of the characteristics salient to the hero was always that he or she was so unpredictable. It was literally highlighted in the story plot. Something that in Europe we didn’t need to focus on so much. What seems like ages ago, I wrote a post about the cultural differences between the two – and inherent implications.

I can use a lot more education and execution in the digital space myself. So I agree with your premise.

6.  You personally embrace being yourself and not holding back, and that’s one of the reasons you are such a magnetic personality in the industry.  Why do you think it is so hard for many other marketing professionals and other executives to “be themselves?”  As communications professionals, how can we encourage the attitude necessarily for others to stop hiding behind talking points, buzzwords and jargon and be who they are?

Thank you, that’s very nice of you to say. I have a couple of unfair advantages: 1) I was made in Italy; 2) I majored in Liberal Arts in University; 3) I’m a woman and think connectively.  The first one gives me the ability to hold conversations virtually anywhere. We grew up taking mostly oral exams and learning to defend our thinking in group discussions. We talk practically everywhere – the bus stop as well as the coffee shop, in line at the post office, on the train, you name it. The second one gives me a tremendous training with critical thinking and a knowledge base on which to apply it.

The third one is the most unfair, even as I need to work on it constantly. Whether you believe that there are differences in how we process information by the connections in the corpus callosum, which facilitates communication between the two hemispheres in the brain, or not, both genetics and environment influence how we think and operate. I grew up in a very intellectual household. My father owned hundreds of books and two encyclopedia – in the house. The classics, theatre, poetry, you name it. And few believed in me, a girl, growing up. That’s probably why I’m such a voracious learner – survival!

Which is a long-winded way of saying that education and environment matter a great deal in shaping someone’s attitude. In the US there is the cult of the specialized field, the higher degree in business. Not enough time is spent on getting to know oneself through the stories of others, a deep understanding of the language (yes, English is my second language) and terminology.

Those are the foundations for making a claim in the field of thought. Because it’s so enamored with action, the North American culture cuts itself off reflection. You can’t buy self-awareness at the bookstore, you need to actually learn how to measure yourself with intent, personal meaning, and context. All things that you don’t get in a convenience store, in motion.

7.  You’ve been a member of The Future Buzz community for quite a while, and I know readers here appreciate you taking the time to answer these questions.  Anything else you’d like to share with us?  The floor is yours…

Don’t ever give up on yourself. Go beyond the first, obvious, answer. Stay curious and be helpful. Thank you for reading and for the opportunity to be with you today.

Don’t forget to connect with Valeria by reading her blog and following her Tweets.