Keep Your Profiles Updated

I had a significant change in my life on December 31, 2009, as that was the day my family and I sold off our ownership positions in SOAR Communications to my former business partner.

Interestingly, it didn’t hit me until two days ago that I needed to make changes to all of my various public Internet-based profiles (and biographies) to accurately reflect my new reality. Which leads to the point of this blog post:

When was the last time you reviewed and/or updated your public profiles (and/or bios)?

For me, it had been WAY TOO LONG.

In taking a personal accounting, I realized I’ve got profiles on

• Facebook,
• LinkedIn,
• Plaxo,
• Google,
• Flickr,
• Twitter, and (of course)

on two blogs/Websites:

• Politis Communications, and
• The Betty Factor.

So I’ve now started that process (as shown in the photo above), and I plan to spend this morning reviewing and updating ALL of my public profiles/biographies.

And if you haven’t done so lately, I recommend you do the same:

Review and update each of your public profiles and biographies today.

I’m going to add this as a once-a-quarter task to my calendar to make sure I stay on top of this task in the future. I hope you do so too.

Betty Benton Mann, the “Betty” Behind the Betty Factor, Died Friday Morning

Betty Mann (of "The Betty Factor" fame)

Betty Benton Mann, my 83-year-old mother-in-law and the inspiration behind The Betty Factor, died in her sleep early Friday morning, December 4, 2009 of health matters incident to old age and having her gall bladder removed earlier in the week.

Here is a copy of her obituary.

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After 83 wonderful years on earth, Betty Benton Mann returned home to her Father-in-Heaven, the Savior, Jesus Christ, many loving family members and friends, and her beloved husband, Ray, on December 4, 2009, nearly two years to the day after Ray’s passing.

Born July 3, 1926 in Boise, Idaho to Mamie Thompson and Otto G. Benton, Betty was the fifth of nine children. She was raised in Boise, Twin Falls, Idaho and Redondo Beach, California.

From the day she first walked herself to services as a young child, Betty was a devout member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS). As a teenager, she was president of her ward Golden Gleaner organization and helped plan and run the first ever LDS Youth Conference in southern California.

After graduating from Redondo Union High School, she moved to North Salt Lake to help her oldest sister, Wanda, care for her children, and it was there that she met her future husband, Ray Elwood Mann.

Betty and Ray were married in the Salt Lake Temple of the LDS church on May 4, 1948. They settled in Bountiful, Utah where they raised three daughters and two sons, while she also worked as a dental assistant for many years. Betty was active in the PTA in Bountiful where she ran the Halloween Carnival for three years and served as PTA president for two year.

After their youngest children graduated from high school in 1975, Betty and Ray spent an adventurous year in 1976 in West Germany for Ray’s employer, Chicago Bridge & Iron. The next year, Ray was transferred to world headquarters in Chicago where they lived until 1984. During their time in Naperville, Illinois, Betty filled an eight-year volunteer assignment with LDS Social Services working with out-of-wedlock mothers, including service as a counselor to birth mothers and transporting newborns to adoptive parents. She also served for a time as a member of the Relief Society presidency in the Glenbard Ward in Illinois.

Betty and Ray moved to Sandy, Utah in 1984 where they made their home for the rest of their lives. In Sandy, Betty served for 18 years in the LDS church’s Data Entry Program in the Canyon View Stake. She and Ray also served a one-year LDS Service Mission in 1994 near Bakersfield, California for the Home Management Department.

Betty was preceded in death by her parents, five siblings, her husband, and one son, Clyde. She is survived by four children, Linda, Pam (Harold) Egginton, Todd, and Allisha (David) Politis; 18 grandchildren (evenly divided between boys and girls); and 14 great-grandchildren.

A viewing will be held at Mountain View Mortuary at 3115 East 7800 South in Cottonwood Heights, Utah from 6 to 8 p.m. on Tues., Dec. 8, 2009. The funeral will be held at the same location at 11 a.m. on Wed., Dec. 9, preceded by an additional viewing from 9:45 a.m. to 10:45 a.m. Interment, on site, will follow immediately after the funeral.

The family extends its heartfelt thanks and admiration for all of the fantastic doctors and medical providers who worked with Betty in addressing her health concerns during the past few years. In addition, Betty (and Ray) loved living at South Towne Ranch in Sandy, Utah where they made many wonderful friends.

Betty had a sharp mind and wit her entire life, and she loved studying the gospel of Jesus Christ and learning about LDS church history. She was a devoted and loving wife, mother, grandmother, great-grandmother and friend, and although she will be missed, we are happy she has “graduated” from this life to be reunited with her husband and best friend, Ray.

Goodbye for now, Betty.

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Although we had some initial son-in-law / mother-in-law challenges early in the 28 years of our relationship, we both grew to love and respect each other over time, and I’m grateful Allisha and I were able to have both Betty and Ray live so close by as we raised our five children.

She was a good person and taught me much, not the least of which was to always remember to work and work and work to make sure what I wrote could be easily understood by anyone, even my mother-in law.

To that end, I will always use the phrase “The Betty Factor” as a shorthand reminder of that lesson. I will also keep this blog alive in her honor and as a way of continuing to teach about the importance of keeping all marketing messages simple and on-point.

Thank you, Betty, and for now, goodbye. 

Marketers: It’s Time to Come out of the New Media Cave

I have been on Twitter for a year or more now. I like the tool, it allows me to interact with and get to know the media and some of my key audiences, mentors and peers. That said, is it the end all solution for PR and marketing campaigns? Well, that depends on who the audience is.

This morning, I saw some interesting stats on Twitter and other services like Facebook and MySpace. Make no mistake, these new online services are growing like wildfire, but is that enough of an indicator to make these the silver bullet that saves PR or becomes the new default means of communication with audiences?

Personally, I don’t think so.

I think being in the tech industry causes me to forget there is a world of non-techies out there, services like Twitter and so forth become a sort of echo chamber, or, as Plato might put it, the “cave.” (My dad is one of these non-techies, for years he had an Instamatic camera that he never used, and recently I suggested he use an RSS reader to get news from his favorite car blogs, his response, “not right now, maybe later.”) So it should come as no surprise when research indicates that while Twitter is growing like wildfire, it is still not being adopted on a massive consumer scale.

Which leads me to my point, I think, when planning a campaign, what should we focus on? Do we want to wow our client with the newest, latest and greatest technologies, or do we want to use the tried and true methods tools that have gotten the job done for years. I think there are advantages both ways. As PR peeps, should we be agents of change, forcing the market to adapt to us by adopting Twitter and other new fandangled online tools, or should we go to where the audiences are? How do we measure our audiences? Is it quantity or quality?

These are all good questions, that good PR people should be asking themselves as they play their next PR campaigns.

I think these tools are great and have helped me land coverage in some good publications for my clients. I have also learned a lot, been informed of world events and what some of my fellow twitterers are doing at all hours of the day. But, and this is a big but, let’s keep this in perspective. Twitter is a tactic, heck!, most of these new tools on the Internet are tactics, and part of a bigger online strategy, and as with most everything in our lives, as part of our campaigns, these tools should be balanced (moderation ring a bell to anyone?).

So, be wise, be prudent, be realistic, and for our clients’ sake, let’s come out of the cave and look around, I think we’ll be surprised.

Four Marketing Lessons from the TweetSum Video

TweetSum is a brand new tool for Twitter users that launched just a few weeks ago.

As Twitter tools go, TweetSum is interesting in that it allows those in the Twitter-universe (”Twitterverse”) to quickly review their Followers and people they are following, ranks each by a TweetSum ranking, and allows you to Ignore, Follow or Un-Follow people very easily. But that’s NOT why I’m writing about TweetSum here.

Actually, I recommend you check out TweetSum’s explanatory video on its home page. Here’s why.

1.   The video communicates the TweetSum brand perfectly.(At least I think it does.) According to the About section on the site, TweetSum was banged together over a weekend by a bunch of friends/colleagues in Seattle. And given

• the titles the TweetSum-ers have given themselves,
• the style of writing on the site,
• some of the terms/language they use (FYI - the rating system noted above is called the Douche Bag Index or DBI for short),

I’d say TweetSum is a tongue-in-cheek, we-don’t-really-care-if-you-like-us-or-not just-use-our-service kind of a company.

If I’m correct with my read on the TweetSum brand, the brand message comes across clearly in the video in the opening lines when a voice intones “TweetSum : So filled with awesome your head will explode.” Yeah, it made me smile too.

2.    The TweetSum video quickly explains the problem (and the answer) faced by most Twitter users — deciding who to Follow (or stop Following).

3.     The video simply shows how TweetSum works.

4.     And the TweetSum video is only two minutes & 19 seconds long.

So why am I writing about TweetSum and its online video? Two reasons.

A.   TweetSum shows how easy it is to both introduce and reinforce your brand from the very beginning by using an inexpensive, yet very informative, video on a company Website.

B.   Online video is becoming more and more important to the search engine algorithms as they spider across the Web. Those sites with video and other forms of multimedia content receive a stronger rating by the search companies. And the more relevant such content is to the site where the video is found, the better off the content is judged.

When you use video on your site(s), consider reinforcing such content with written content as well. This can either be a word-for-word copy of the video or supporting language.

As I understand it, the Web-spiders and the algorithms are not quite to the point yet where they can “read” the videos and what they contain — just that they’re on your site, what metatags and headlines they have, and what “closed captions” (if any) they contain.

Since most videos on the Web do NOT contain closed captioning, adding on the word-for-word and/or supporting copy is a good idea (at least for now).

Congrats to the TweetSum team for a good use of online video. You get a “Happy Betty Award” for your efforts.

P.S.  The “Twitter in Plain English” video is another great example of an online, how-to video. It’s found on the Twitter homepage as well as on YouTube.com. Here it is:

The Role of Social Media in Branding Efforts

My friend Jason Kintzler (@PitchEngine) - founder of Pitch Engine and overall social media junkie - started a personal blog the other day called New Media Cowboy and launched it with a post entitled “Social Media is Branding.”

Kintzler’s post reminded me that many internal branding efforts are misdirected at best because they’re caught up in the old world way of marketing-think: Specifically, “I (the big, important marketing executive) will tell you (the lucky consumer) what to think about and how to act toward my brand (be it product, service or organization).

This approach is so bass-ackwards it’s laughable, and yet it’s still the way many companies attempt to brand themselves, their products and/or services.

In reality, the definition of a brand has always been directed by those on the receiving ends of any and all communication and marketing efforts and NOT by those on the sending end.

It’s like my very first communications professor at BYU said: “You cannot not communicate.”

In other words, everything we do or say is a form of communication (or marketing, if you will). But since an effective form of mind control has not yet been invented (thank goodness), we cannot control how others will perceive such communication efforts.

Hence, communication has NEVER been a one-way street; rather (at a minimum) communication is a two-way thoroughfare (marketing too). And it is the perception of those receiving any marketing message that determines the brand of an organization, a product, a service or person and NOT the other way around.

“The perception of those receiving any marketing message determines (one’s) brand . . . NOT the other way around.”

That’s what intrigued me about Jason’s post.

He suggests that social media and the tools/services that make up social networking efforts are in fact branding efforts at their very core because they’re all about two-way communication and engaging individuals with one’s organization, product, service or person.

The reason why this observation is so critical is that the best customers are not just repeat customers - they’re evangelizers. They tell others about their great experiences with your brand and as a result they expand your sales, marketing and communications efforts many, many fold.

Why? Because they’re not on your payroll; they’re independent from your organization. As a result, what they write, say and/or do has a HUGE CREDIBILITY - often times generating more impact than virtually any other thing that you might attempt.

Kintzler’s right - social media is ALL ABOUT BRANDING. 

This is a very important concept to grasp and it should flavor any social networking effort undertaken by every marketing, PR, new media and/or communications pro from this point forward.

7-Election ‘08

I never thought that after hours of studying, researching and writing in the library one of my greatest educational moments of the night would result from a conversation about 7-11. After inviting my husband and me to canvass Colorado next weekend, my sister-in-law told us in an ecstatic but hushed voice that “The Sev” was now selling its killer $1.29 hot chocolate in Obama cups. She learned about the 7-Election campaign when her enthusiastically republican roommate came home sipping her warm drink out of a McCain cup. “Don’t worry,” the friend dryly assured her, “they have Obama ones too.”

I learned that for the past several presidential elections The Sev has given its patrons the opportunities to cast their vote in their cup. So, my husband and I decided to break away from the library to cast our 7-Election votes- partly because were fascinated by The Sev’s marketing campaign, and partly because we wanted a warm snack that would satisfy our midnight munchies. We maneuvered our way through the 7-ll crowd to find the blue Obama and red McCain cups were appropriately on opposite sides of the hot drinks bar, though they did require the same lid. Across the way were a group of college girls who had instead chosen to express their political beliefs with their respective blue and red Slurpees. As my husband was putting away his change, I had to ask the cashier which presidential cup was more popular. Considering his store was in the middle of Utah (University of Utah isn’t the only part of the state that is through and through red), I was surprised that with a line of customers behind us he took so long to respond. His mind automatically went to the national 7-Election figures instead of the local ones I was curious about. “It’s hard to say,” he said pensively. “We’re selling a lot of Obama cups on the East Coast, but here it’s all McCain.” This gentleman then briefly mentioned his political concerns in a way that showed the 7-Election campaign reached farther than the cash registered. To him, it carried great implications for our country’s future.

As we drove home in residential stop-and-go streets, my husband teased me for hesitantly sipping the hot chocolate through the lid’s opening. “They make it the perfect temperature so you don’t have to worry about burning yourself.” “But I have been burned before!” I responded, thinking about all of the hot chocolate injuries I had sustained throughout my life. I then realized I was as nervous to sip out of my 7-Election cup as I was to cast my vote for the President of the United States. Politicians have burned me before, and I’m worried about getting burned again. Both the Obama and McCain cups have warm, chocolaty propositions, but how can I be sure that the beverage beyond the opaque lid won’t scorch my palette before I have a chance to taste it?

7-Election is an effective marketing campaign with many consumer and educational facets. Honestly, I was relieved to find that the cups weren’t the souvenir kind that you feel compelled to find room for in the cupboard. However, my husband who gives me a hard time about keeping my designer teakettle on the stove found the “perfect” spot for the disposable container on our kitchen windowsill. He’s excited to fill it with more hot chocolate and sport it around campus. Also, the 7-Election, its website (7-election.com) has the current results, the fun facts about past 7-Elections and links to cnn.com and usatoday.com. The Sev is helping average voters establish our own political opinions, one sip at a time.

Blogging about Blogging

Starting and then maintaining a blog can be challenging if you haven’t thought through a couple of important questions:

1. What should I blog about, and

2. How often should I blog

Jon Greer, author of BNET’s Catching Flack blog has some great points and additional links for business owners looking to start their own blog.

Read Jon’s original blog post on BNET

Five Marketing Lessons Learned from Watching Movie Trailers

My wife and I took three of our kids to go see the new movie “Prince Caspian” last Saturday, the second installment in the Chronicles of Narnia movie series originally penned by C.S. Lewis. (I loved the movie, by the way, whether or not it adhered precisely to the book.)

However, this article is not intended to serve as a critical review of this or any other movie. Rather, my goal here is to examine the role played by entertainment marketing experts as they advertise forthcoming movies through that long-used vehicle known as a movie trailer.

Originally, these long-form advertisements would follow feature-length films after they finished playing in the movie house. By the 1960s, however, filmmakers realized that they were losing the potential impact of such “trailing” ad efforts because moviegoers were leaving their cinema seats as the closing credits began to roll.

So . . . even though such trailers began to play before the opening scenes of the featured film, the term “movie trailer” continues to be used in the entertainment vernacular today.

We in the Politis household are fairly active moviegoers, and we probably catch an average of two to three first-run movies each month (depending upon the month). And we typically try and watch movies during their opening week. As a result, we get to see a LOT of movie trailers; not as many as movie critics or hardcore movie fans, but enough to be sure.

As a strategic marketing communications professional, I find movie trailers fascinating, if for no other reason that some are so fantastic, some are so awful and some are so average. (Probably a simple mirroring of the movies themselves, eh?)

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Social Networks: Relevance Trumps Size

In a world where bigger is often seen as better, marketers know that targeted impressions are much more valuable than sheer number of impressions.

For example, eMarketer recently predicted that by 2011, half of all adults in the U.S. and 84 percent of online teens will be using social networks. With more than $1.6 billion ad dollars going to social networking this year, marketers are often in uncharted territory when it comes to getting the most bang for their advertising dollars.

The safest and most obvious way to make sure you are reaching your target audience is through smaller, emerging social networks.

Niche sites like meandmybicycle.com and anglingmasters.com (former SOAR client) reach a very specific audience (cyclists and anglers), allowing for some very cool and unique campaigns.

Targeting niche sites that relate to your products and services are also seen by users as less obtrusive because your company is an authentic member of the community or conversation.

Getting the Most Out of Your Keywords

There’s been a big to-do lately about the power keywords hold in keeping businesses noticed. Falling into the realm of search engine optimization (SEO), the proper use of good keywords are a powerful way to keep your Web page at the top of the search engine results.

For those who aren’t as familiar with SEO, it is “the process of improving the volume and quality of traffic to a Web site from search engines via ‘natural’ — sometimes call ‘organic’ — search results for targeted keywords.” So as you can see, keywords play a huge part in driving traffic to a Web site.

So how can we make them more effective? There are a couple best practices that help generate the best keywords. They include:

1. Make them relevant to customers. It may be an obvious observation. But in practice, some people are still not using the keywords their customers are searching. If you’re not sure what they’re searching, ask them. Mr Beldin had a great suggestion. Gather a few family members or friends, and ask them what terms they would search for after you describe what you’re doing. Sometimes you’re too close to what you’re doing to realize that the keywords you’re using aren’t matching the keywords your customers are looking for.
2. Along with making it relevant to customers, think about misspellings, too. Customers aren’t typically spelling bee champions, so there’s a high probability that from time to time they will spell a word or two wrong. Including misspellings in your keywords will help you still reach the customers who can’t spell.
3. Use phrases. It used to be that searchers would only use one term when searching for something in a search engine. But people have realized that using only one keyword will give you too broad of results, and as search engines have advanced, so to have the number of words people use to search for the right Web site. So use phrases as your keywords, too.
4. Don’t limit yourself to a few keywords. There’s a popular saying, “Go big or go home.” That applies to keywords, too. Generate a large database of keywords you can use and you’re more likely to attract Web traffic. Keep in mind rule #1, and keep your keywords relevant. But don’t limit it to a certain few.
5. Localize the search. As much as the Internet enables global connectivity, people still want to use it for local searches. Therefore, make your search applicable to the local market. Use terms like, “PR firm in Draper, Utah” — hopefully that brings up Politis Communications.

As in all things, keep tabs on your keywords to make sure they are working for you. Review them regularly to avoid letting your Web site slip in the rankings. It requires a watchful recognition of what’s happening in your particular market, but doing it right can bring tons of benefits.