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.

Hispanics and Marketing

Hispanics make 15.1% of the U.S. population, and it’s projected that by 2050 the Hispanic population in the U.S. will grow to 24%. With such numbers, I believe Hispanic marketing and PR could become an even more profitable way of doing business in the near future.

I’m originally from Chile (South American country), thus my opinion might sound a little biased, but during my six years in the U.S. I have come to realize the important role that Hispanics play in the marketplace, as well as the social and political U.S. arena.

Though Hispanics are considered the largest ethnic minority in the U.S., I think there are two main problems when attempting to interact with them: lack of marketing exclusively towards Hispanics, and a lack of marketing from Hispanics.

While living in the U.S. I have noticed that a number of large companies could be doing a better job with Hispanics. Some companies try so hard going after “the one,” they forget about some of other potential publics.

Though the problem mentioned above is a fact, I think the greatest problem lays in marketing and PR being generated from Hispanics.

While walking around town I have seen so many Hispanic restaurants and stores go out of business after two or three months in business, that I wanted to find out more behind this tragedy.

Not too long ago I decided to go to a new Mexican (owned by a Mexican) restaurant in Provo. As some of you may know, Provo is a college town (home of Brigham Young University) thus the whole town is full of college students. While eating and having a good time there, I noticed the owner was close by so I decided to talk to him.

After introducing myself and talking for a while, I asked him how the business was doing so far. After looking at me for a second he went on to confess they were doing fine, but they weren’t getting many new customers. I then went on and asked him if he was trying to target college students or younger publics besides Hispanic families. The owner told me he had tried to but wasn’t willing to spend much money on it. I asked if he had tried social media, I added that it was free, reached a lot of the younger generation, and that his message could be heard by a lot of people in short period of time.

After discussing a couple of good strategies to start with, and some other ideas to generate more customers through Twitter and Facebook, the owner was sitting in our table, exchanging phone numbers, and thanking me for that simple advice. I’m sure that restaurant is not going to generate millions of dollars in revenues because of my advice, but I think the owner has learned a great lesson on how to interact with his publics in a better way.

I sure hope that restaurant does better in the near future, in the meantime I will keep my eyes open for more opportunities and if I’m lucky I might get a free taco out of the whole experience!

175 Million Reasons Why You (and Your Company) Should be on Facebook

The latest comScore numbers are out, and there are now 175 million users on Facebook.

In other words, in less than a year, Facebook has now caught and surpassed MySpace as the most relevant and compelling social networking platform in the world. (Hmmmmm, maybe those guys at Microsoft are pretty smart after all.)

Recognize that roughly 70 percent of all FB members are from outside of the United States (or approximately 122 million users), which may or may not be a good thing for you and/or your company.

But for those of you just focused on the U.S., that still means that more than 50 million Americans are on Facebook, which is pretty mind-boggling when you stop and think about it. In other words, since its founding in February 2004, Facebook has now captured more than 1/6th the entire U.S. population as users/members.

Assuming you’re reading this because you work in some aspect of marketing, communications, public relations, shareholder relations, sales, management or a combination of these areas, 50 million of anything is a BIG DEAL! And if 50MM is a BIG DEAL, then certainly 175 million is an even bigger deal!

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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:

On-the-Record? Yes, Always! And it Cuts Both Ways!

A few weeks ago I was at the monthly luncheon of the Utah County Chapter of the PRSA listening to Derek Garduno (a former Politis Communications employee), address the audience. (Derek’s currently the Communications Manager for the Utah Jazz.)

During his presentation, Derek shared a truism I had taught him years before when he was fresh out of college. Specifically,

“You’re always on-the-record.”

For those of you not trained in public relations or journalism, on-the-record is a term used by reporters and journalists that means that what you are saying (or doing) is fair game to be reported and can end up in the evening news, in tomorrow morning’s paper or in someone’s blog that’s getting posted in the next two minutes.

Sometimes it’s possible to go off-the-record to provide selected and trusted journalists with information - typically for contextual, background purposes - and not be quoted in a story.

However, not everyone can be trusted (journalists included).

So as a rule, we advise our clients and employees to simply adapt the attitude that you’re always on-the-record when speaking to a journalist, even if a reporter agrees that something is “off-the-record.” That way you play it safe and minimize the risk of getting burned by an unscrupulous and/or overzealous journalist.

So that’s the background. Now for the juicy parts of what happened earlier today and why I’m writing this specific post.

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In summary, after apparently not getting the help/information he wanted from a Toronto, Canada-based tech PR/marketing specialist, David George-Cosh (tech reporter with the National Post) went off on a phone call with said PR specialist.

At roughly 1 p.m. (EST) April Dunford, the PR specialist, posted the following on her Twitter account (@AprilDunford):

Reporter to me”When the media calls you, you jump, OK!?” Why, when you called me and I’m not selling? Newspapers will get what they deserve

[NOTE: Not counting the red text, this is exactly how the tweet appeared.]

Then began what can only be called a very public (and embarrassing) digital breakdown on the part of reporter George-Cosh, with the reporter dropping F-bombs onto Twitter directed at Dunford, and getting upset because of what she posted onto Twitter. (His Twitter handle is @sirdavid.)

Interestingly, Dunford did NOT disclose George-Cosh’s identity in her original tweet. It was apparently only after he repeatedly attacked her on Twitter that Dunford disclosed who the reporter was: George-Cosh.

For the record, if you look up George-Cosh’s Twitter account, it is (as of 9:30 p.m. EST) totally locked up with all of his updates “protected.” His blog also seems to be down: http://strangehold.com/blog/. His bio on the NP.com page is also missing.

However, you can read the blow-by-blow description here on Ian Capstick’s MediaStyle blog.

Learning a Lesson from a Twitter-based Têtê à Têtê Tornado

What’s the takeaway from all of this? It’s simple: You’re always on the record.

And in today’s Me Media world where literally anyone can become (and probably is) their own publisher, you have to be really careful about what you say and do when you’re around anyone.

And the higher profile you have (like being a tech reporter for one of the leading media outlets in Canada), the greater the likelihood your conduct will come under public scrutiny - and ridicule.

In other words, there is no such thing as off-the-record!

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UPDATE: At 6:18 p.m. (EST) today, the Editor of the National Post published the following apology on the NP’s Website:

“We hold — and will continue to hold — all our reporters to a higher standard in how they address anyone, in any forum.

Learn Social Media Tools and Services Fast with Links to 200 Social Media Sites

The biggest challenge for anyone working in marketing is how fast the entire Web 2.0/social media/social networking scene is moving.

In fact, things are moving so fast in the social media/networking space, if you blink, you’re suddenly behind the curve. 

It’s with this in mind that I point readers of TheBettyFactorblog with this link to a great resource I just found online written by blogger Jason Mayfield at OpenJason.

Specifically, you should check out his blog post titled “Knowledge is Power: Here’s 200 sites that give you power.”

is Jason’s list comprehensive? No, as some very obvious social media/networking services/tools are missing from his post, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and MySpace, just to name a few.

However, it’s a very good list and a great starting point for anyone looking for a fast overview of just some of the Web 2.0 things people and companies are doing on the ‘Net.

Good job, Jason.

Case Study: Ford Uses Social Media as a Fire Extinguisher

The lightning speed of the Web is usually a great thing for us communicators, but, ask any company that has misstepped, or has been the butt of a viral video, and any corporate communicator will tell you that the speed of the Internet makes matters worse.

This is where the adage, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” is a real invaluable piece of advice. Scott Monty (@scottmonty), Ford’s head of social media efforts, posted a great case study of Ford’s use of social media tools to deal with a recent crisis communications event.

The case study is courtesy of Ron Ploof

The Ranger Station Fire

Do Blogs Influence Purchase Decisions? BuzzLogic Research Study says “Yes!”

Although Wired magazine may believe that blogging is dead (see “Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004“), consumers haven’t apparently gotten the memo.

In fact, the results from a recently released study sponsored by BuzzLogic shows that blogs have a significant influence on purchasing decisions. (See “Study” Blogging’s Dead? Someone Forgot to Tell Readers.” and the BuzzLogic news release summarizing the research results.)

Key findings from the BuzzLogic research across 2,000 online consumers?

• 50 percent of blog readers find blogs useful for purchase information;
• 52 percent of blog readers said that blogs played a role at the critical moment when they decided to move forward with a purchase; and
• 40 percent of blog readers say they have taken action based upon seeing an ad on a blog.

Additionally, consumers also said that reading blogs helped them

• Decide on a product or service (21 percent);
• Refine choices (19 percent);
• Get support or answers (19 percent); and
• Discover products and services (17 percent).

Naturally, I recognize that I’m writing about some of the benefits of having a blog within my own blog post (kinda like a self-fulfilling prophecy.) But just because I’m using this medium doesn’t make the research findings any less important or useful.

If you (or your organization) don’t have a blog, start one! Today!

If you have a blog, make sure you’re adding to your blog on a regular basis.

Promote your blog regularly via social media tools/services, email, and other more traditional marketing and sales vehicles.

And don’t just take my word for it - research backs up this premise: Blogging pays for itself!