MediaJoltz

Two friends of mine posted about Delta and the horrific video of a plane being stuck on ground for 7 hours. Check out Scott Monty’s blog post: New Delta? You be the Judge or CC_Chapman’s post: New Media Smacks Delta or watch the video here for yourself:
Lately I’ve been having a conversation about business and the potential for negative comments and press. I can see that a company doesn’t want bad press on their webpage-who would? The idea behind using new media, though is to get involved in the conversations that are already going on.

In Delta’s case, I would own up to this and tell their side of the story-not make excuses but let everyone know they are aware of it and ready to deal with it. To avoid this would make them look completely out of touch, and untrustworthy.

Tip of the Day: Get involved!

For those looking for the interview with Joe and Mike from the salesroundup podcast, it is in an earlier post. You can either scroll down to podcast #3 post or click here: Interview with Joe and Mike.

So I had someone ask me the other day: “What do you say to a company who is scared about the negative publicity you can get by blogging or using a type of new media.” I posted this question to Linkedin and received numerous answers. I also emailed this question to some friends of mine including Greg Grimer who does the podcast Voices in Business as well as The Cold Calling Podcast with his partner in crime Mike O’Hara. Included in this email was also CC-Chapman who does everything from podcasting to running a marketing company called Crayon in second life. I couldn’t forget to get the opinions of Joe and Mike from the SalesRoundUp podcast. I also included Mitch Joel who runs the Six Pixels of Separation podcast.

And Seth Godin wrote back and so did Cord Silverstein who writes Marketing Hipster as well as Shelly Palmer of Media 3.0

And they all wrote back good answers too. Because they used email and I do not have permission to post them, I will not. But the gist of their answers was what I had told him-and I felt very satisfied to be back up by such a prestigious list of leaders in New Media! (thanks guys) This is what I said:

To avoid conversation in this day and age is going to work against you. People are already having conversations about your product or service already. New Media, like my post on starting conversations is about communication with clients, or listening to the communication they already are involved in. Starting a blog, podcast or getting involved in social media allows you to find out what people really think about you and then improve on those things people don’t like.

The more I thought about it though, I had more questions that I started to ask myself:

1. What about companies who want to play dumb in public? They know there are negative things about them and they have corporate people listening and watching to find out what those negative things are and are working to improve those problems, they just don’t want the complaints right there on their website. What do you tell them about new media?

2. The second question is: New Media is a new scary thing. So how do you talk to those people who are scared and scared of trying new things? If you start talking about blogging and podcasting and social networking they feel overwhelmed. So where do you start?

3. The third is: Why should they trust that new media is the way to go? Why should they trust me when I tell them that they need to do X now? Everyone says it is a matter of when, so why now and not later, what makes it so that their company ought to be doing this now?

So for these questions I decided to post them to the blog so that we might all benefit from the answers. So please feel free to comment with your opinion!

I thought I’d share some tips on how to record a phone call on Skype. This is a tutorial video that starts after you have downloaded Skype and Pamela both are free applications and can be found very useful to use.

Two of the reasons I use Skype and record the phone calls with Pamela is if I am having an important conference call with someone and I it is important to document what they said either for legal reasons, or so that I don’t have to worry about taking detailed notes during the initial conversation.

This is also a great way to call someone, interview them and use it as a podcast, the sound quality is great and you can more easily interview people not local for podcasts! So, watch and learn.

Tip of the day: Now you can podcast with people all over the country without leaving your office!

(Click on picture to take you to URL of Video)

I wasn’t sure what I was going to write about today but I got inspiration from my mother. I love my mother very very much, but she is very behind the times. The only thing she uses a computer for is email. Her phone needs to be the type that has “dial” and “hang up” as the only buttons.

Because she is looking to move out here to Utah to be by her kids, she has been staying with me for the past 8 days. I found myself explaining things that had always seemed really easy to me. Instead of typing an address in the URL field of a website, she always went to Google to type the business name in and then just clicked on the link in the search that came up. She didn’t know where she was suppose to type the url.

We took some video footage of a beautiful place here in Utah called Cascade Springs. My mom wanted to know if we could take still pictures from the video footage. I told her we could, or we could just put the video footage up online so she could watch it there too. She was puzzled that we could do that-which might have been understandable, except for the fact that for the past 5 years she has watched footage we’ve shot of Christmas and other holidays over the internet. She said she wasn’t sure if there was a special camera we shot with in order to get it online.

This morning she was going to some classes designed to help with the job search. As we were walking out the door she remembered she needed a pencil and so I got out a mechanical pencil and handed it to her. She looked at it and then back at me then back at the pencil, shook her head and then with panic plastered across her face said, “I don’t even know how to work this. You don’t have just a regular pencil?”

Something as simple as a mechanical pencil to me, represented a contraption of panic to my mother and thats when I got it. We all have different levels of understanding in the world. Some things click and someone might understand the first time, while it might take a while for others to take hold and embrace something new. New Media is not suppose to be scary or frustrating to anyone. It is a way to communicate easier, but it doesn’t mean you have to get it right the first time you do a podcast, or your blog will be set up perfectly and ready to go on the first try. Everything takes practice and time and this doesn’t exclude media.

I guess the lesson I want to let others know that I learned is that if you don’t understand something, thats okay. Don’t panic, take your time.

Tip of the day:  Go to Blogger.com to get your feet wet on blogging, give it a try, don’t be scared of it, you can’t mess it up or ruin anything. If its not for you right now, thats okay too.

Last post I talked about starting conversations. Well how do you start conversations? By being creative. I want to highlight a local company out of Orem, Utah. Blendtec is a company that sells blenders. How bland can you be selling blenders? There are tons of types of blenders and when it comes down to it, they all are made to do the same exact thing-blend.
But out of a stroke of pure experimenting, Blendtec came up with a creative way to show the world what their blenders can do-and can do better than their competition.
Instead of going the Tupperware route of “look how strong our blender is, we can roll over it with this car and nothing will happen” they decided to play on the strength of their blender: that it can blend almost anything and created the Will It Blend Series. I know the current blender I have has a hard time blending the fruit I put in it let alone hockey pucks!
Here is the video from an interview I had with George Wright, Marketing Executive Blendtec, about so many odd months ago about where the idea came from and what the results have been:

So not only are they seeing their bottom line increase, but they’ve been able to create big brand image where their Blendtec name is now spread throughout households all over the world. No one has ever taken a blender and stuck a rake in it and posted it to the internet before.
What can you do with your product to make it exciting???

Tip of the day: Use new media to be creative with your service and product!

The other day I was talking to someone about new media telling him how cool it is. How you can now reach your clients and clients can reach you directly. He kept asking what the ROI of new media is. I started to explain to him how you can connect to clients, talk to them directly, they can talk to you directly. You can increase your brand image and make connections around the world who can become very excellent resources.

I actually understood that he was talking money, but I wanted to see what his reaction was. It was exactly what I thought it would be because his next statement was “That’s all great, but how much more money can I make from new media?”

I knew from this question that he really didn’t catch the vision of new media. He was only interested in the bottom line, about “what’s in it for me?” This is NOT what new media is about.

New media is about taking a new way of communicating and using it to reach others and start conversations. Blogging, podcasting and the social network sites are out there to be able to have direct conversations with those who are interested, allowing them to talk back AND facilitating a way for them to more easily talk to each other.

When you are able to talk directly with your customer and client, you are letting them see a more intimate part of the company. Now this company has a personality, it has life. People feel they get to know you better, and people do business with those they know, like and trust.

When you allow your customers and clients to talk to you, you are now more than just a shoe store, a financial planning company, a bank, etc, you are someone who cares what people want. You are listening and want to hear about what you are doing right, and what can be improved and people like that.

If you step back allow those who have interacted with you to talk to each other-you gain valuable market research, and learn far more about your company than you could ever imagine. You are able to hear the conversations people are having with each other and learn the real reasons they do business with you-or don’t do business with you and then you can create better campaigns based upon that knowledge.

Here are two companies that are using blogging as a way to communicate with their audience. One of them gets it, the other doesn’t.

First up is Marriott. The owner, Bill Marriott has started a blog to communicate with his audience. He posts regularly about where he is, what is going on in the area of different hotels and often about his family. He even posts about issues affecting the hotel industry like passport regulation changes. The blog does talk about Marriott Hotel-because that is the company, but doesn’t feel intrusive like an advertisement. He comments on something about the company and those reading give their feedback. On his first post, he had 136 people comment!

This is a man, a company that understands communication is a two way process and not always just about the bottom line.

The second company I want to use as an example is Yahoo. Yahoo doesn’t get it at all. Here is a company TRYING to implement a new media strategy without fully understanding the meaning behind it. Yes, they have started a blog called Yahoo Mail. It is in beta right now and I hope that someone at Yahoo hears this and changes their way of thinking. If you look at the blog-even the subtitle completely misses the point

So basically they’ve created a blog about all their latest and greatest improvements-yuck, who wants to subscribe to a blog that only blows its own horn where post after post is an advertisement-give us meat, and give your company a better personality.
Second, if you scroll to the end of each post, there is no way for me to communicate back to them how I feel about a product they’ve just written about. In one of their posts called “As You Wish” the first line says: A fresh new version of Yahoo! Mail Beta is here, and your ideas and feedback are at the core of what makes it stronger and more useful.
Well if that is the core of what makes it stronger, why can’t I comment on something you write, where the heck do I go to give you the ideas and feedback I have?
So after posting day after day about the new releases of product, they don’t even let me tell them what I think about it, good or bad. It is a one way conversation that isn’t going to work.

Now, I do have tons of examples of people who are seeing their marketing ROI increase with new media. I think this is call for the next post to be about Blendtec….
But you see, the key to this exciting technology is the ability to communicate-and with more than just the local market, but around the WORLD. If you do it right, great things will happen, I promise.

Tip of the Day: Use New Media to get in touch with people who otherwise you wouldn’t be able to reach!

An interview with Joe and Mike from the SalesRoundUp podcast (www.salesroundup.com) reveals their beginnings of podcasting, what benefits have come from podcasting and what the best part of podcasting has been for them.

I love these guys! This is a casual talk with some great buddies all the way from Boston. I used Skype to call them and had a great conversation about why they started to podcast. These are two guys whose background is in sales, but decided that it was time to share with the world their knowledge tips and tricks.

I wanted to do interview podcasts for two reasons, the first one is that I wanted to get business owners who are already using new media to give us some ideas on how we can use it ourselves. The second is to show that it can be done. I had a little learning curve figuring out Skype and recording the call, but if I can do it I know you can too!

This is a little longer than the other two because there was so much good stuff I just couldn’t cut anymore out. I think most of the interviews are going to be this long but they’ll be packed with great information. Enjoy!

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