This is what music + video is supposed to = .  Glad to have been a part of it.

A few weeks ago, while talking in the office, John said three words that made me chuckle; “the perfect tweet”.  It was said in passing, as a part of a larger conversation, but that combination of words hit me and I sent myself a quick message; the perfect tweet.

As a person who makes a living via conducting campaigns for brands in the social media space it makes sense to be drawn to a concept, like being able to craft The Tweet of All Tweets, but instead of thinking of this as a goal to be achieved I laughed. because the concept in itself was just silly.

You have 140 characters per tweet and no limit to the number of tweets you can send…just tweet and move on.  Mistakes are going to happen and knowing how to best deal with these mistakes is a part of what real social media marketing is.  Spending hours reviewing or having this micro communication pre-approved is too costly for the value you will receive back from a post.

The perfect tweet is the tweet that your deisred recipients receive right when they need it.

Social media isn’t an exact science.  There is a formula, there is a process, but there is no one right way.  There is no “perfect tweet”, but there are “perfect tweets”.  This is not a new concept, but it is a great one that we need to remind ourselves of from time to time.

Don’t want to take my word on it?  Use my good friend Google and educate yourself on the topic.  Derive your own opinion.  It will hopefully give you the confidence to maximize the return you receive from participating in this unique network.

…”The Perfect Tweet” from Twittercism.com…”Four Types of Tweets” from AndrewMager.com…”10 Mistakes When Tweeting” from TheFinancialBrand.com…”Top 10 Reasons Your Company Probably Shouldn’t Tweet” from AdAge.com…”Perfect+Tweet” search results from Search.Twitter.com…

(note: the image is of William Faulkner, get it?)

It has been 40 days since the last bigMETHOD blog post.  We have plenty to say and share, but to say that we have been busy is an understatement.

It is an interesting thing, this “busy”, when you are the co-captain of your own ship.  We added a few new brands to our roster and grew as a company. John and I turned our full attention to our clients and there is less time to do many of the social things that we do to share our culture; specifically blogging, tweeting, and going to industry events.  I miss being social, but stepping out of the conversation is a great thing as once again we redeveloped the definition of the value we provide to our clients.

“We Can’t Be Your Voice, But We Can Help You Find It.”

We have been saying this for a while, but recently we made a stronger push to deliver our product encapsulated in that message.

Given the choice, people would rather hear from the brand directly, as opposed to hearing from the agency that represents them.  This seems like such an obvious thing when you say it out-loud, but look at the current client/agency structure within the PR, marketing, and advertising world. It is practically unknown for an agency to encourage the client to handle these tasks on their own, in their own voice.

A social media marketing agency can do many things for your brand.  To us, the most value we bring our clients is making it easier for them to connect directly with their consumers.  This is the barrier that social media has broken down, the ability to establish direct lasting connections. Lasting connections do not exist when reliance is on paying an agency for the privilege of them contacting the users and influencers.

I have stated more than a few times that to succeed in the New Marketing Space, a space that is powered by user generated content and feedback, you need to ask yourself questions like:

• Do you have a good product?
• Are you offering something that is different and needed?
• Is your product making life better/easier for your consumer?

There has never been a greater need for real-time research and monitoring of your consumer base to evaluate if your product is something that people want and need.  As an agency, we have evolved so that we can provide you, our clients, with the most return on your investment (ROI).  In doing so, we have seen an increase in the value that we provide, as well as a decrease in redundancy in the work we are do, since we are focusing less on delivering success and more on laying the path to success.  There is no easy way to do things right, but we are working to create new ways to make doing the right things easier.

We continue to expand upon this way of addressing marketing and the evolution of our agency as we work to maximize the social web to benefit our clients, so stay tuned!

How it came to be, that’s the easy part. On May 19, 2006 - four years ago today - I uploaded this video to YouTube:

Eight months earlier I was so fed up with my narcissistic, egomaniacal boss back in Boston that I decided to “leave internet marketing” altogether to jump into the music industry here in Los Angeles. That ironically landed me in the new media department at a major record label.

It was a short run that would never have worked out. I didn’t want to be a cog in the machine.  At the time I simply wanted to bring fresh ideas to the table and use them to support something I loved. So I cold-emailed their management (and now dear friends of mine) of a my favorite unknown band back east. The message included “at the moment, I don’t think there is another artist coming up that gets me more excited or that I have more confidence in the future success of. Which is why I’d love to discuss with you what I can do to lend a hand.”

GPN’s management and the band’s label, Hollywood Records, were gutsy enough to take me at my word and try what at the time was a completely out-of-the-box plan.  Seriously nobody was doing this at the time. I have no idea why they agreed to run with it, but I’m thankful every day they did.   The pitch: I’d research far and wide to find bloggers around the country that had written about similar artists like Lucinda Williams or Gov’t Mule, send them a CD and some free tickets, and see what happened from there.  A simple but unprecedented campaign.

After a few weeks of research and planning for the unknown I was ready to go. Originally the plan was to send just a link to a track and album review copy.  At the 11th hour I saw the Nothing But the Water clip above. It absolutely blew my mind, and I knew if there was going to be an introduction to this band that had to be it.  It wasn’t a marketing lesson you learn in school. It was a feeling. How could someone with an affinity for the style of music see this clip, hear that voice, and not want to pass the word along?

So I registered a YouTube account, uploaded the video, and led each email with that link.

The first person I reached out to was Tom from Twangville. An hour later this happened.  Second was Charles from Ashcan Rantings. A half hour later this happened.  That afternoon something dawned on me that to this day serves as the foundation for everything we do: if you create something great and put it in the hands of voices that matter it will sell itself from there. I didn’t have to say much. We just found the right folks and let Grace’s performance do all the talking.

*Side note: a year later I ran into a prominent music blogger down at SXSW that had regularly been covering the band and asked how he heard about them. He told me it was that Ashcan Rantings post. Lesson #2 - relevancy trumps readership…it’s a small world and you never know who’s reading who.

As the story goes, we just kept doing more of the same and it kept working. Writers around the country were covering a band that at the time had little reach outside of the state of Vermont.  And I couldn’t have been more proud or felt more lucky to be a part of it.

From there we took our first case study to other bands and labels and turned a one-off campaign into a full-time gig. Over time, blog outreach for artists turned into full blown strategic marketing plans for consumer brands and prominent organizations. That’s where we sit today, having stumbled into the launch of an agency with a strong history and a lot of promise for the future.

In 4 calendar years a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. A quick breakdown:

What’s changed:

• Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are weeks away from dropping their latest record, fresh off the recent Rolling Stone nod as “best new band of 2010.”  They just did the Ellen show, put out a show-stopping music video and are primed for the recognition they’ve always deserved.
• We’ve taken the concepts we developed on the music side and applied them to an incredibly wide range of verticals.  Successfully.
• The fledgling blog PR operation we started on accident is now a fully functioning strategic marketing agency with offices in Los Angeles, CA and Boston, MA.
• Our clients are no longer taking a chance by turning to social media. They’re taking a chance if they’re not turning to social media.
• The campaign executions we were pitching that were ahead of their time in 2006 are outdated in 2010.  Our thoughts on engaging the social web are at totally odds with the services many clients come to us expecting to implement.
• MySpace is no longer everyone’s main priority.

What hasn’t changed:

• Grace Potter and the Nocturnals are still our client and a priority for us every day.  We’re still uploading videos, sending information out to influential voices, implementing out-of-the-box campaigns, and completely blown away by the music they’re putting out there.
• While our programs have become diverse, we still clearly have a passion for music, and still see it as the laboratory for new ideas and implementations.
• The core team that put the first campaign together is still conferencing daily - still brimming with excitement for the latest and greatest initiatives.
• Where social media as a whole has hit the mainstream, we’re still battling daily to break ground and push the envelope of creativity in the space.
• Although the campaign executions are a little outdated, the methodology and philosophy behind what we do remains. Listen to what your audience is saying, creating something worthwhile, and connect directly to them to deliver the message.
• Working on MySpace layouts still confuses and frustrates us regularly.

It’s been quite a whirlwind. Couldn’t have written it any better, or asked for it to happen any other way.  All I can say is wow.

Espree Devora is founder of ZexSports.com & EspreeDevora.com as well as a friend and familiar face around bigMETHOD.

Recently I spoke with Greg about the power and value of social media during the IASC’s annual skateboard industry summit at Camp Woodward here in CA.  I have a great video of that talk, which I will post next week, and in the meantime here are some great tips from a previous event Greg and I worked on together entitled “WHERE’S WALDO? Finding Social Influencers & Decreasing Your Costs“.  Hopefully you can find value to enhance your online marketing skills within this collection of feedback from our panelists.

What are some of the key components to most social media campaigns?

1. Research & Strategy – this was stressed as the most important part of the process.  Do you research first.  Assess your market.  Look at your competition and see what they’re doing and not doing.  Get a baseline of your current stats to compare to as you progress through your campaign.

2. Mediums & Destinations – just because there are tons of social networks and platforms doesn’t mean you need to target them all.  Match the areas you’re targeting and the mediums you use to the target audience and focus your efforts on these strategic areas.  These could be Facebook, LinkedIn, Your Own Blog, a targeted niche community (ex: http://woodtube.ning.com/).

3. Video - Have your team riders create and upload videos daily. The more consistent the content, the more consistent the customer.

4. Blog Outreach – Don’t make the mistake of blanket messaging bloggers.  Take the time to target the key ones in your market and reach out to them and ask them how they would like to be approached.  Keep track of these preferences and nurture these relationships.  Each one may require a customized approach.  The effort pays off, however, as they are seen as key influencers who affect the decisions of your target audience.

5. Micro Blogging – Make use of the micro blogging platforms (ex: Twitter, Posterus, 12 Seconds) to connect with people, have conversations, represent your brand/product and to act as beacons collecting people into your key destinations (see #2).

6. Contesting – People go bananas for contests!  They give up their email address.  They do things for you like tweet and re-tweet.  They create videos and take pictures.  The collective value of the customer information you get along with the organic and persistant web content is worth so much more than the widget or thingamabob that you give away.  (See @jonathan360 a great example repping  Ford #FiestaMovement with an audience participation moment highlighting the fact that he’s driving around in a free car with free gas for six months)

How to measure ROI on a social media campaign?

1. Sales & Cost Savings – If you’re driving traffic to an online storefront, then the data you can track is even greater than any traditional media spend.  You can absolutely track and trace purchasing to the source (given…you have to take some time and effort to put the tracking mechanisms in place).  bigMETHOD created the 1st social media analytic tool. This is not the same as Google Analytics which tracks your website statistics. bM Analytics assesses how effective your social media presence is in converting long term customers.  You may ask for a demo on to see just how much data they can track about social media campaigns using their proprietary tools.

2. Subscriber Base Growth - If you value your customers, or if you value your audience then measuring your subscriber base and calculating the value of an individual against this base can directly represent “return” on your investment.  Measuring your overall subscriber base is the collective total of your Facebook Fans, Twitter followers, Linked In group members, Email Newsletter subscribers, podcast downloaders, You Tube channel subscribers and more…  You can also compare the alternate costs of acquiring these customers and assign that value to the number.

3. Content Consumption - Most ad campaigns online charge by view or by click. If you publish a video that gets 100,000 views…there’s value associated with that.  You can measure the consumption of your content (image views, video views, page views, podcast downloads) and measure it against a per-view value set by the same cost that you would have to apply to an ad buy or paid placement.

4. User Engagement & Conversations- Blog comments, @ replies and inbound emails generated by your social media activity are a metric you can measure.  The value of these mentions are similar to the value of consumption as well as subscriber base, however they are more of an opportunity for conversion where someone has indicated an interest in your message and its up to you to convert them into ambassadors for your product.

5. Site Traffic & Referrals – Using analytics for your sites, you can easily measure the effectiveness of your campaign and assign a value to that.  Watch your traffic spike and grow as you apply your social media strategy or dip and decline as you fail to execute.

6. SEO Benefits – Your link backs and page rankings for keywords should be used as metrics for ROI analysis.

7. Product Development & Feedback – Lowering R&D costs by crowdsourcing is a huge win for companies looking to develop a product.  Using social media for this is an extremely effective way to engage with the market to help deisgn and refine your offering.

Useful links & tools thrown around during the talk were:

• Hookit.com - instant custom social network for action sports brands
• http://www.insidefacebook.com
• Facebook for Influencers group within Facebook
• Facebook commerce integration (example: http://www.facebook.com/WarehouseSkateboards)
• Online Commerce Tools: BigCommerce.com / Shopify.com / SortPrice.com
• Red Bull’s Twitter Fan Page on Facebook with over 3,000,000 fans

Innocent enough, I like notifications when new functionalities are added to the network.  But look at the options:

1. Add all of these Pages to my Pages
2. Be reminded to add all of these Pages to my Pages later
3. Choose Pages to add individually

What if I don’t want to add any of these Pages now or later?

I didn’t like this.  Facebook is too focused on getting users to expand their network so that they can show the value of their community to advertisers.

This made me think about the Like button more.  I wondered how easy it would be to remove myself from Open Graph.  I already knew that you don’t delete your profile you just deactivate it and because of this you need to delete all of your personal information before deleting.  What I didn’t realize was how many steps Facebook would put me through to even deactivate my profile:

1. In your Account you click on the link clearly marked “deactivate”

So the next thing I expected to see was at most to have to click on a confirmation message and I would be home free…

2. No.  Facebook takes you to a page to make sure you want to deactivate your account.  On this page they make sure to put pictures of 5 of your friends saying that they will miss you, to hopefully keep you as a registered member (cheap ploy).

But that is not all, they require you to tell them why you are leaving.  There is no “I don’t feel like saying” option.  This is getting to be an annoying process to do something so simple, but I think I finally am out of here.

3. No.  Now I have to enter my password…

Finally, can I get on with my life?

4. No!  I have to enter a CAPTCHA?

Did my password not take care of any kind of confirmation that needed to happen?

All of that to just deactivate an account?  Facebook really wants to keep us on the needle.

Anyway, I have already logged back in to make sure this whole little test didn’t delete my account.  I am such a junkie.

There has been a great deal of chatter over the past week about F8 and the revolution that is coming with the “Like” button.  As Pete Cashmere of Mashable said, “Rather than aiming to be the coolest bar in town — and losing its clientele when they leave for a hipper spot — Facebook plans to become the Starbucks of the web, with a Like button on every corner.”

If you look back over my older blog posts about Facebook you will see that in general I have praised the network for choosing the right path more often than not.  Their actions have reshaped the social web.  The introduction of this use of the Like button might be the wind that changed the course of this support ship.

What is Facebook’s goal for the Like button?

“Make no mistake, this is a power grab. Facebook is making a play to become the single-sign-on and social-sharing engine for every major site on the Net. Call it the FaceWeb.”  - Dan Tynan from PC World: Why I, Like, Really Dislike Facebook’s ‘Like’ Button

Facebook is trying to win and they are looking to unseat the current king above all others, Google.  The difference between the two is that Google lets users search for keywords and then makes suggestions based on the information it has gathered from other users doing the same thing (basically).  With the Like button and the “Open Graph” it produces Facebook wants to make suggestions based on your profile even when you are not searching for anything based on the information it is constantly gathering from your friends in comparison to their network as a whole.  It really is a pretty great idea, but if you have seen the movie The Minority Report and how advertisements were fed to people in the movie (annoying), that is the direction Facebook is headed.

Reading around the various news blogs relevant to all things social web it seems that most people have been wow’ed by this new strategy.  Dan (read the whole post, he is on point) along with a few other writers and many Facebook users are not loving this new use of personal information.

Below are some more article excerpts from Mashable so you can better see what the Like button does and how people are talking about this change (I stuck with one resource because there is just so much out there about the Like button and I don’t feel like spending days combing through the same opinion on 10 sites to prove that they are similar, deal with it!).  When reading these continue to think about this being your information that you felt comfortable posting because when you signed up for Facebook there was a sense of privacy and control that you now associate with the site by default and not just as an evolution for the provider of your favorite past-time (innocently stalking your friends):

Facebook’s Open Graph Personalizes the Web

“Facebook has created a platform that allows sites and apps to share information about users in order to tailor offers, features and services to each one’s interests and tastes — even if that individual has never visited the site before.”

“users are connected to people they know, as well as public figures, services and products they like; Facebook’s new platform will allow websites and apps to share this information with each other.”

“When you connect to sites like Yelp via your Facebook profile, Yelp will have access to any information you’ve made publicly available about your favorite foods or favorite bands, and will be able to take that into account when giving you information about restaurants or music venues. For example, Yelp could pull information about your favorite music from data that Pandora added to the graph when you favorited a song on its site.”

Pandora Partners with Facebook for Social Music

“The combination of Open Graph and the new, wide-reaching “Facebook Like” button around the web means that “liking” a band on a third-party site will register with your Facebook profile, which can in turn inform your Pandora profile even while you’re discovering music at other points around the web. It also tightly hooks your Pandora profile with your “real” social graph of friends on Facebook. In the words of CEO Mark Zuckerberg, all of this allows the social networking juggernaut to build “instantly social and personalized experiences” thanks to this underlying level of social graph integration.”

Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy

“Nevertheless, it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see.”"Be aware of your privacy settings.”

I love all of the tech / social media blogs that I read regularly and Mashable is easily in the Top 2 when it comes to these sites.  They provide amazing information and great value.  But let’s be clear, we are not at the end of the evolution of this Internet epoch.  All of these great blogs and blog writers can miss the real potential impact from time to time and right now many of them are not recognizing how major this change could be to user loyalty, and in turn the future of Facebook.

Why is this change so important?

Facebook beat MySpace because there was some sense of order, the network made users feel safe and in control of their content.  The Open Graph associated with the Like button is a change made to be useful to businesses and services while providing enough value to users to keep them mindlessly engaging within Facebook.  This change of use for the Like button abandons Facebook’s policy of considering the user first.  Instead it caters to those with money - businesses and advertisers, and not the reason they are appealing to people with money - the size and engagement level of their devoted network.

Users are not looking for businesses to be able to more easliy find them because they or their friends are interested in something similar - they are looking for their friends to individually recommend products directly to them because they know what their friends will like and may need.  Every user on the web is a personal filter for every other user in their network.  When a user is first exposed to a product or message that engagement is the gateway to evaluate if this product is good enough and if it should be a brand that should expands - if “yes” we share, if “no” we do not.

Brands are going to have to accept this as the way of life and death moving forward; they are going to actually need to make something that is good and needed to be successful, marketing will no longer allow them to slip by into the mainstream.  They will have to give your product to real people and have those real people tell others about it because they really found it worth talking about.  Not every product was meant to be, in fact we have far to many “things”.

What is the next evolution for the Internet?

Here it is… Web 3.0 (ew) will be the organization of the Web 2.0 mess.

Then what is the problem with “Like”?

Redundancy.  As a global society we are all working more than past generations to produce less, and the same is true here of Facebook.

What (in my opinion) is the solution?

Be the mall, not the store.

One thing that people overlook time and time again is that unlike the real world the Internet is not restricted by geographical location.  Because of this there is really only the need for The One.  One personally customizable central organizational area that allows us to begin to control the overwhelming amount of information being broadcast by businesses and brands, interesting content found throughout our lives, and stay connected with our friends.

This is what Faceabook should be focused on perfecting.  Trust me, there is plenty of money in being the mall.

Conclusions?

Feel free to call me an unrealistic idealist, but this battle to be The One should not exist.  The Internet is new, it is global, and even though money can be and should be made by individuals who make great things happen within the space, the injection of companies looking to reap massive profits from the technologies associated with these means of communication instead of being satisfied with it simply as a more cost effective medium to sell their consumer products has turned us all against each other and against true progress as we fight over the minority portion of the booty.  When someone develops a new tool to use the Internet in a new way they should be rewarded based on the value it brings.  Once they have been compensated in a way that is deemed fair by the mass, those new systems should become a part of the general toolbox for all to use so that our collective resources are not being used to repeatedly reinvent the wheel.

Here is a great example of what companies keep doing wrong: Twitter is about to launch its own official application for Blackberry users.  There are already numerous applications that have already been created for people to use Twitter more effectively, but this is Twitters attempt to enter that same space so that they can make some money off of their service just like these other companies.  That sounds sensible but the real question is, why wasn’t Twitter doing this already?  Why were they allowing others to make money off of their invention?  Why were those other companies not compensating Twitter since they were built on top of its shoulders?

The truth is Twitter will probably fail with this application, and in turn the monetization that would have come through it, because the tools that have already existed allow for communication within a greater number of networks beyond Twitter.  The one thing Twitter holds of value then that no other company built on their shoulders does is your personal information… Crap, they have painted themselves into a corner again.

My favorite quote is from Mahatma Gandhi, “You must be the change you wish to see in the world.”

Facebook is not wrong in their belief that there is immense monetary potential in controlling the single-sign-on and social-sharing engine categories.  The Like button will most likely mean a great deal of money and success for the network over the next short period of time.  But by not being the “bigger man” and working to bring together all of the single-sign-on protocols and social-sharing tools to provide order to these aspects of the Internet Facebook is ignoring the larger potential for greatness that could allow for the company to beat their noble enemy Google and become Connor MacLeod of the Internet.

Facebook could adjust and become this.  Google could invest in this as well and continue to win.  There are other titans out there as well but these two are going to be fighting the battle and one will be The One (for now).  The third option is both of these brands stick to the tracks they have begun to lay and a third contender makes this, what the consumer will want, and will win.  This third entry into the battle for the future of the Internet could be the greater Open community online, but can they get organized to complete the task before Mr. Moneybags waves too much money in front of too many faces and kills the possibiltiy?

So what then?

Leading up to the release of her new record Badu has been placing teaser videos on the web - each of which are preceded by a countdown she hypes to her 100k followers on Twitter. On Friday this meant the official video for “Window Seat”, which you can view here:

A conversation piece to say the least; which is exactly how it was used.  After posting it to her site on Friday, Badu’s @fatbellybella account turned into a hub of a vibrant discussion on music, nudity in art, dealing with inhibitions, and the philosophy of groupthink.  As the conversation lit up my twitter feed I couldn’t help but smile at how one of my favorite soul singers unwittingly laid out a playbook for making an impact on the social web.   It reads like this:

1. Go big or go home.
   
   The “Window Seat” video is a stunt, and I mean that in an absolutely complimentary way.  There’s a lot of content out there littering our inboxes and social networking streams.  It takes big ideas and bold moves to break through the noise.  I commonly hear friends, colleagues, and clients point to the internet as the testing ground or secondary outlet for content and campaigns. “We’ll take all the b-roll and put it on the web at some point.”  Sound familiar?That line of thinking isn’t going to cut it in 2010.   If you want to get your audience talking you’ll need to give them something to talk about.  Stripping naked in the streets of Dallas worked for Erykah Badu.  What you got?
2. Know that it doesn’t take much….money.
   
   This video couldn’t have cost $1,000.  I’m betting even less. Perhaps there used to be a significant correlation between video shoot budgets and their eventual impact on the marketplace.  Those days are certainly behind us.  Not every low-budget shoot is going to go viral, but they have just as great a chance as their high-budget counterparts.Creativity has replaced financial flexibility.  Artists and brands alike must now more than ever focus on thinking outside the box. Great ideas mean something again, and the best ones can be executed without throwing all the dollars at it.
3. Open up.
   
   Putting yourself out there is one thing.  Putting the real you out there is another. Amidst the ongoing discussion of the video and its implications Badu has laid it on the line 140 characters at a time - the concepting, her initial fears, her expectations, the feelings she had in the moment, and what she hopes others can draw from the final product.  It has been transparency in its truest form.  I’ve sincerely appreciated it and I’m likely not the only one.  This is what we want from the individuals and organizations we friend, fan, or follow - the inside track and a human connection to make us feel even closer.   As real and unfiltered as possible.

4. Open up…the conversation.
   
   If this video dropped on Friday and Erykah Badu spent the past few days tweeting a monologue of her thoughts about it for us where would we be?  Who knows, but I’d say probably not discussing it here on the blog for starters.  The allure of the event for me…which led me to notice and click to see the video to begin with…has been the non-stop dialog between Badu and the Twitter community since Friday.  She has been consistently asking questions, answering comments, highlighting related tweets, and generally putting a direct emphasis on the importance of the overall conversation that has unfolded.  That’s the genius in it - understanding that the benefits of messaging control pale in comparison to the reach of the discussion.  Bringing us to another point:
5. Don’t just accept the criticism, embrace it.
   There’s always so much concern with what an audience’s reaction will be in the social media space.  ”What if it’s bad?  What do we do then?”  Clearly Erykah Badu would say embrace it.   She’s right.  We stand to gain more by learning from the negative critiques than we do by suppressing them.  To put it bluntly, it’s the internet.  It only takes a few clicks to find out the other side to any story.  Addressing criticism head on establishes trust and adds credibility to the positive spin you want to put out there.

6. Do it for a reason.
   
   What good will 20 tweets about you every minute for 3 days do?  Potentially nothing - unless you’re looking for a way to raise awareness about the new record you’re releasing that week (or you have loftier goals of changing the way your audience thinks about the world).   Beyond a shadow of a doubt Erykah Badu has accomplished both of these goals.  There are thousands of tweets, articles on CNN, BET, All-HipHop, HuffPo, and a dozen major news sites, and countless bloggers like me covering this as we speak. This is perhaps the most valuable takeaway.  The success of a campaign is only as good as its end purpose. A billion views add up to a whole lot of nothing if you’re not doing it for a reason.  So the next time you think about tearing off your clothes on a crowded city street, think about what you’re trying to achieve.  It’s the whole point.

I had the absolute pleasure of traveling down to Baltimore, MD this weekend to attend the first ever Fitbloggin’ conference, a coming together of bloggers from around the country connected by a shared focus on health and fitness. I traveled down with Keith Williams, the Marketing Director for LA Boxing. We were there to give a short presentation, provide information and answer questions about the LA Boxing Workout and gyms, and learn from an increasingly important group of influencers in the fitness community.

It is our collective belief that what LA Boxing offers in a workout and an outlet for its members is so strong that there is no better way to grow awareness than to simply get folks into the gyms to see for themselves and spread the word from there. Clearly blogging and social media are an ideal vehicle to carry this message. On the flipside we know that there’s no better source of thoughts and ideas on how to evolve and position the organization than to listen to what current and prospective member have to say. Fitbloggin’ represented a mecca of opportunity to connect with precisely the audience of fit-driven individuals we would love to experience the gym…and at the same time learn as much as we can about what makes them tick.

In short the experience was amazing - in no small thanks to the unbelievable job Roni Noone did of hosting and organizing the conference. Flawless execution of an event that was clearly comfortable, enjoyable, entertaining, and informational for everyone in attendance. I came away with so much, and here are just a few of the takeaways:

1. There’s no substitute for Real.

We had a short window of 15 minutes to address a buzzing conference room of what we view as 150 of the most important pairs of eyes and ears in town. We used that opportunity to offer up a genuine story of how LA Boxing is approaching the social media space. Four months ago, the local gym in Ashburn, VA offered Shelley McCullers, mother of 2, the chance to try out the LA Boxing Workout program for 90 days in return for one thing - reporting back to her small following of readers with whatever she thought about the training process. In that short period of time a lot changed - Shelley is more invested in her personal health, feeling great, and has lost over 20 lbs.

We shared this remarkable transformation at Fitbloggin’ and the response was pretty incredible. A lot of smiles, some clapping, and a line of women coming up to express their interest in doing the same thing Shelley did. But why? Transformation examples are a dime a dozen in the diet/fitness world, and free stuff is nothing new to the blogging community. If you ask me, I’m betting the house on one word - real. LA Boxing is saying that they’re willing to put their *** on the line for anyone to see. That the social media objective of the organization is to provide the target audience with an unfiltered view of the LA Boxing Workout - and we presented a completely real, absolutely genuine example of what they mean. This is incredibly powerful. No tag line, no new creative, nor any branding initiative could ever take the place of something so simple, or so real.

2. This is truly a Community.

As I said on Saturday, I came away from Fitbloggin’ impressed and humbled at the open and friendly nature of everyone in attendance. From the outside looking in we were just the vendors. We were also the odd men out in terms of being…well, men. But you wouldn’t have known it. Everyone I spoke to welcomed us with open arms, took time to share stories, thoughts, and ideas, and were actively making an effort to makes us feel a part of this truly special event.

And that’s just us. The interaction that I saw amongst 150 bloggers, most of which had never met in person before this weekend, was downright inspirational. The only comparison I have - a situation where people were so happy to enjoy each other’s company and completely invested in every moment they could share in the limited time - is my college reunion. So think about this. We’re talking about one group who spent day in day out with each other on a mile-wide campus for a span of 4 years. From this I’m finding similarity to 150 “strangers” who typically only recognized each other based on the resemblance to their Twitter avatar.

The connection is simple - shared growth. After months and years of posts and tweets, successes and struggles, affirmations and consolations, these are individuals who have grown up together. Along the way they’ve helped build what is now a living, breathing community. It’s something we take for granted and often overlook in the social media space. Through the 1’s and 0’s real friendships are being made. Ironically they’re set up to be even stronger than their real-world counterparts. Where in the past friendship has traditionally relied heavily on proximity, we’re now living in a world where bonds are based more and more on shared interests and shared experience. It’s a beautiful thing.

3. We’ve got our work cut out for us.

For a PR professional, marketing maven, social media guru, or whatever any of us choose to call ourselves on a given day, making an impact is going to be increasingly more challenging as time goes on. Every day the windows of opportunity are closing on textbook approaches, proven methodologies, and established strategies. Shortcuts are becoming obsolete. Every initiative is going to take tempered thought, real analysis, and a ton of hard work.

It’s nothing we haven’t known for a while, but it really hit home for me at Fitbloggin’. I came away from the conference feeling like we did a fantastic job of taking the time to listen, learn, and illustrate an important point - we had no gimmick or short-term marketing plan. This was truly about investing time and energy into a community that LA Boxing knows is going to be crucial to the success of their organization.

Now we have our work cut out for us. First impressions mean nothing without backing it up and continuing to show that the dedication is there and that mutual respect is worth continuing to fight for. So going forward it will take the same combination of patience and enthusiasm that we brought to begin with. It’s a valuable lesson to learn for any organization worth their weight in 2010.

4. There are no “types” of bloggers.

Also nothing new here on the site, but worth repeating as it’s a mistake a lot of agencies and organizations both make in their approach to outreach in the social media space. I can’t count how many times I’ve heard someone say “the bloggers will love this” or “what categories of blogs should we reach out to?” or “what type of bloggers are you targeting”? Every one of these statements assumes a lack of individuality in the writer and a fundamental misunderstanding of just how personal the blogosphere is at its very core.

Fitbloggin’ is a great example. This was a conference specifically tailored around health and fitness, which could easily sound like one thing. That’s if you didn’t take the time to read, listen, and begin to understand that it’s really 150 different things for 150 different writers. Even if you tried to boil this down to diet vs. fitness, or weight loss vs. nutrition, you’d be missing the intricacies of yoga vs. running, vegan cuisine vs. cheese and cookies, or blogging as a mom staying healthy vs. writing as an expert on workout routines and calorie counts. There were no two of the same bloggers at Fitbloggin’. Just like there are none on the web. Just like there are none in real life. Another absolutely paramount point we should never stop hammering home in the social media community.

5. The only thing brands have to fear is themselves

While it fades more and more each year there has always been a sense of hesitation from the brand side in terms of immersion in the social media space. To some extent this is with good reason. Nestle proved this week exactly how detrimental a wrong move can be for an organization once left at the mercy of the conversation. That’s really the point though - absolutely any downside to taking part in the social media community will come at the behest of a mistake made within the organization. Nestle’s nightmare didn’t come about because some Facebook users got out of hand or a blogger was on the loose. It happened because they messed up. They didn’t understand what they were doing and spoke without thinking.

This becomes more evident (going back to Fitbloggin’) when you see the natural tendency of bloggers to want to support brand products and services. It makes sense really - they want to provide access and information to their readers for as much helpful information and direction as possible. A brand with inherent value for a blog audience is a great gift to offer up. So the horror stories about negative reviews and blogosphere backlash don’t just come out of nowhere. They are prompted by a mistake or shortcoming within your organization.

A decade into the 21st century social media now does a lot of the message spreading for us. Providing a valuable product and excellent customer service are the two most important things we can do. It sounds simple, but it’s a lost art in a world that over time got used to covering up for our mistakes with marketing dollars. Thankfully for everyone it’s becoming less and less of an option.

Wrap-Up

Again, if I haven’t said it enough, thank you to Roni Noone for an excellent conference, and to all of the new friends we made for a memorable weekend. I learned so much, and this short recap hardly does it justice. Hopefully it shows in the way we approach working together in the future, and makes for an even stronger community than the one we had the pleasure of taking part in at Fitbloggin’.

Really excited to head down to Baltimore, MD this weekend to attend the first ever Fitbloggin’ Conference put on by Veronica Noone. The FitBloggin’ Conference “is for anyone who blogs about fitness, wellness, good food and a healthy lifestyle – regardless of where they are in their journey.  The dream and goal of FitBloggin’ is to bring together the community of health-conscious bloggers for a day of education, networking and friendship.”

I’ll have the pleasure of attending alongside our ‘toughest’ clients, the folks at LA Boxing, and a good friend we’ve met along the way on the interwebs, Shelly McCullers.

I can say that over the past couple of days of following the tweets around this, it’s going to be a lively bunch.  I’m in awe already about the great good nature and great vibes coming out of everyone that’s en route to Baltimore for this.

Will be reporting back, but for now look forward to seeing you all down there!