People read blogs because they are interested in the thoughts, experiences and knowledge that a blogger has. The best blogs also entertain, too. But what they do not do is paid editorial advertising - that’s for the banner ads. When a blog writer gets caught accepting payment for positive product mentions, what follows is a PR disaster, all the worse because other bloggers feel that their world has been tainted.

That’s why TechCrunch quickly made a big deal of it this week when an intern of theirs got caught being rewarded with a laptop for a post: he got fired and all his posts got wiped immediately. No names were given, and reaction seems to be that TechCrunch’s responded well and maintained their credibility. A few bloggers though, traced the guy’s identity and wondered who was willing to pay him - it’s a known rule of the game that any interests must be declared. The unfortunate thing is that innocent startups had posts about them removed and may also come under suspicion of bribery, too!

If a positive blog post is worth getting, it is prominent enough to get some scrutiny too. If the writer gets paid, the truth will comes out, readers will naturally react in three ways:

1. Not to trust the writer again
2. To assume a company paying for positive mentions could not get them any other way
3. Not to trust such a company

This is something that has not really dawned on some European companies, who see blogging as a legitimate form of paid advertising - in fact, one Swiss social media marketing company, Trigami, bases its business on getting paid blogging coverage. It will eventually dawn on their customers, I think, that this is not what social media marketing really is. The fact that their business model is not big news in the blogosphere is probably simply because they are only doing it in German - if they start with English-language ones, wait for the storm! However, regardless of language, the basic rules of SMM - be open and helpful, and network for all you are worth - may mean hard work, but they are there for a reason!

Twitter’s main audience is adults rather than teens - that’s been known for a while, and figures from Nielsen now confirm this. What I find interesting about this is not that Twitter should be doing more to attract teens, as some people seem to suggest, but rather that is shows what Twitter is good at. Twitter’s service has been quite a blank canvas in many ways, with people using it however they want, and a huge number of third party apps tweaking and adding features such as groups and search, to name just a couple. So to show a large adult following confirms that a very large number of people - particularly in the US and the UK - find it useful.

So why adults, mainly? A good blog post from Ben Parr at Mashable discusses some reasons behind this, and I think puts the main reasons well (and has lots of good comments). To summarise and add a little of my own point of view, it’s not primarily a venue for chatting with friends and sharing pictures, music and videos. It’s more of a broadcasting platform where celebrities, news organisations and companies try to entertain and update an audience. Like a very big, lightweight, multiple RSS service. Twitter is also very much an open community, and young people tend more to stay within communities they know. It’s also a great platform for sharing and developing knowledge rather than getting a quick overview from answers.com, wikipedia and so on. So, to put it in a nutshell, most teenagers get what they want elsewhere, and more easily.

Which, given Twitter’s overall popularity, is hardly a problem. The age profile is actually an advantage for Twitter, I think. One of MySpace’s problems is that a younger audience gets older fast, and their habits change. Having an audience mostly in middle adulthood is perfect for customer retention and the service’s long-term stability. Additionally, the fact that a lot of people use the service professionally means there are opportunities for paid premium content and services.

I think what surprises many people about Twittter’s age profile is that it’s pretty new. Young people tend to be early adopters, and are well understood by developers of social media applications, who are often also young. But actually, despite its youth, Twitter is now well established, in its maturity rather than early adoption phase. Who uses a mature product depends on who needs it. In this case, the wider community. Granted, it still hasn’t settled on a long-term business model, and it’s a relatively new entrant to a relatively new set of social technologies, but it should be taken seriously, and recognized for what it is - which is now much clearer.

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’re running a discussion forum to follow-up on topics from our e-book “How to Market in ICT Today”. The current question being discussed:
“Will face-to-face meetings still be necessary or do you think that with the rise of digital video conference systems, webinars, online communities etc. this will come to an end? How much are you doing now already if any?”

We’ll pass on the results of the discussion to you once the discussion concludes, so be sure to drop by the blog from time to time. In the mean time, we’re very much interested in your opinion. Please feel free to either drop me a note by email or to visit our Facebook group.

We have used Filtrbox quite a bit to monitor blogs and news, and been impressed with the customization and flexibility that take it well beyond what you can get with Google alerts. They’ve now stepped up their paid for service, Filtrbox G2 further, offering a bunch of new features including Twitter monitoring, blogs and social media mentions, and customizable levels of reporting and analysis to name just a few.

Along with location-based and other mobile apps, social network search and real-time search of Twitter and other streams, Google is no longer the only touchstone in search, and companies can miss important, even potentially crucial, conversations by ignoring others - Amazon, for example, recently was slow to pick up on a storm of criticism created by its policy on homosexual themes because it didn’t take Twitter seriously enough.

Of course you can combine tools such as FriendFeed (for Twitter and social networking site content) and IceRocket (for blogs), but at the moment this looks to me like the best stand-alone solution short of signing up with all-round social media software or services like those offered by Jive, Leverage or Telligent, who include monitoring in the package.

Orbit, whose annual show for Swiss ICT companies attracted 247 businesses in 2007, has just announced that it is closing down, as a number of exhibitors, including ERP vendor Sage, pulled out this year, and visitor numbers plummeted. In Switzerland, geography has always been very important and there is still an emphasis on both physical events and on social and family connections, but it looks as though here, too, trade shows are struggling The country was a late entrant into web marketing in general — but now this seems to be changing as online events grow in importance and functionality at a lower cost.

Recognizing this, “Community 36“, a new Swiss ICT community venture has just launched, replacing the 4-day Orbit show with a 36-hour non-stop version, plus year-round talks, an online community, and a lounge in Zurich. I’m a bit puzzled about it as yet. The two day show with all-night party in the middle I think will be a format many will not take seriously. I certainly wouldn’t be keen to go on the second day! And when I looked at the website, I couldn’t see any actual online events or content actually listed, so it looks to me like what Awareness Networks, in its guide to corporate trends in social media marketing refers to as “build it first, and they will come” — something that they warn against! However, this is a small country where people tend to know each other anyway, so perhaps it could work. A web community where a major attraction is membership of a real-life lounge still seems odd, though.

I think this slightly weird offering reflects a common problem in the way many Europeans think about social media marketing. In the US, where geography is  a big barrier, it just makes sense. But here, many people still have no gut feeling for it. At the moment, SMM sometimes gets talked about as a kind of buzzy add-on to marcom and PR, which is a misunderstanding. The focus should rather be on using technologies to organize and integrate existing marketing, sales and customer support activities, to provide more two-way communication, and improve and extend delivery of content. That can also mean new activities and channels, but arising organically. A high-level view touting the ideas of collaboration, reach, online presence, innovation is fine, as these are potential benefits, but the danger is of losing sight of the basics. These are simply making more of existing expertise, customer relationships and content, and involving customers and prospects more closely. In the end, that means tangible business benefits that can be measured, and this is what will really drive the adoption of SMM.

As Ralf mentioned in his blog earlier today, there’s now an iPhone app for Geert Hofstede’s set of five cultural dimensions to use when communicating or doing business across borders. The dimensions are Power-Distance, Masculinity, Individualism, Uncertainty Avoidance and Long-Term Orientation. Hofstede’s distillation of his and others’ work in cross cultural management, drawing on business experience, social science and anthropology studies, is impressive, and a great instant guide to cultural background and perceptions. But just how useful is it?

The first thing to note is that the 5 dimensions are generalized — different regions and even different companies also have their own cultures, and so doing it country by country means a level of generalization. The terms themselves also mask detail. For example, Switzerland rates slightly higher on masculinity than the UK, and it is certainly a more patriarchal society. But at the same time the Swiss (at least in the North) are noticeably less “macho” than in much of the UK. A further issue is that reflexivity is also important - so, while a US businessman may be aware of how the Japanese prefer to do business, the Japanese will also be aware of how US businessmen do business. The final point is that all views of culture also reflect a cultural viewpoint and a particular agenda. To be fair, the disclaimer on the download site hints at these limitations. In a sense, then, this app is a bit like a travel phrase book, something that addresses the basics that you need to avoid misunderstandings and causing offence.

If you’re interested in taking the idea further, a great place to start is Edward T. Hall’s classic book from 1976, Beyond Culture. Hofstede’s 3rd scale, individualism, is similar to one of the key ideas in that book, namely high- and low-context societies. High-context societies typically discuss everything that seems to be of any importance at all within the “in-group” — close colleagues, friends and relatives. So, for example, business meetings are often simply formal ratification of decisions that have been reached already, and companies are likely to hire and to do business with people they are already connected to by family or social ties. Examples of high-context cultures are most Asian countries, France and Italy. The US is very much a low-context culture and, according to some, so are the UK and Germany, so information is discussed on a need-to-know basis, with less distinction between in- and out-groups. One application of this is that when low-context people bring fresh information and issues for discussion and decision at meetings, this strikes people from high-context cultures as abrupt or unnecessary, as the idea of a meeting is so different.

The slight caution I would offer offer over the app is that Hofstede over-emphasizes cultural differences. In my view, it is important to see the other side — differences stand out because we look for commonality, and the search for commonality is important. It is actually at the heart of developing cultural competence, so to focus solely on differences should not be the main thing. To find commonality, it’s important to learn as much about the way a society works — history, governance, entertainment, customs, culture — as possible.

So these indices are really a helpful first step to developing cultural competence, a quick guide for instant use and to clearing up or avoiding major misunderstandings. The next steps you could characterize as “learn, imagine, enrich”. Firstly, learn more about the culture. Secondly, imagine yourself as you might be perceived from a different cultural mindset - not just your behaviour style, but your way of thinking. The final step is to see that another frame of cultural reference offers things that are not included in yours, so offering opportunities to enrich communication, and move beyond do’s and don’ts.

This guest post on TechCrunch  by Eric Clemons I found really thought-provoking. It is quite a long and detailed argument, pointing out step-by-step not only why advertising is failing on the Internet at present, but why it is bound to fail in the longer run. It’s well worth reading in its entirety, but I’ll just give a summary in case you’re in a hurry.

Clemons says that advertising revenues are falling in the mainstream media because people don’t really trust advertising and don’t particularly want it. For example, broadcast networks put on their advertising the same time so that viewers can’t switch channels to avoid it. Even AdWords, Google’s big revenue source, depends on misdirection, or at least the threat of it. And location-based advertising, pushing messages that you are very likely to want because of where you are, the content of your recent e-mails, where your friends go etc, he thinks will also fail because of the trust issue.

It could be argued that the decline in advertising revenues in conventional media is a natural response to the increasing diversity of information sources, and that Clemons is overstating the user’s role in it, but I think there would be a smokescreen. The real point is that users have more of a choice of ways to find out more about any service or product for themselves, which weakens the persuasiveness of advertising content hugely.

To give my own take on Clemons’s argument, the fact is that advertising clearly works best where information is restricted. Where information is free, easily available, and easy to select and compare, users can easily select between information they trust and information that they don’t. A recommendation by friends or from clearly neutral sources has an inherently higher value. So, as social platforms are more and more popular, their role in disseminating information becomes increasingly important.

We’re certainly not the only people saying that the key is to be authentic, and offer users the information they want when they want it. But Clemons’s critique of the paid advertising model makes the most cogent case for this that I have seen to date. To put it in a nutshell, there are two clear consequences, one for marketing, one for PR. In marketing, the point is to engage the prospect more directly, openly and personally, using the best tools and content you can. In PR, same thing, different target, i.e. the blogger, commentator or analyst rather than the prospect. That’s got to be good for the market, the vendor and the customer.

Once again, Seth Godin has hit the nail on the head, this time making an intelligent and important distinction between publicity and PR.  I’ll just give the essence in these two quotes:

Publicity is getting unpaid media to pay attention, write you up, point to you, run a picture, make a commotion.

PR is the strategic crafting of your story. It’s the focused examination of your interactions and tactics and products and pricing that, when combined, determine what and how people talk about you.

In a funny way, this post, and its implicit criticism of the kind of follow-my-leader thinking that befalls many companies, reminded me of an interesting recent Slashdot post, The Formula That Killed Wall Street. Slashdot criticized the over-reliance on computer models that produced a single number to characterize risk, which led to investment decisions way beyond brokers’ financial and professional depth.

At Extendance, we often get asked about how we monitor results. It’s a legitimate question, but often I get the feeling that what the client would love is a magic formula or tool that will be the key to measuring PR success. However, the secret of PR is, as Godin says, not numbers of mentions or hits, but the creation of identity, something that just has to be understood and worked at. In reality, it’s much more important to work from the story, and set more store by the relationships and leads that build week on week than quick indications of impact.

As always, it feels too early to go back to work. But it’s also the right time to look ahead and get on with the year. A lot of companies have delayed their market budgeting and planning till the new year to see how the land lies, so now’s also a good time to look at the industry environment and what marketing and PR are going to be most cost-effective. Our CEO Ralf Haller recently wrote his predictions for what will be hot in product marketing in 2009, and what not, and I think he’s spot on. So rather than making my own, here are three from other industry experts that I found interesting.

1. Business social networking to grow

Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis in a group podcast for Briefings Direct:

The first one for me is vendors tackling enterprise-plus-consumer based social networks, a blended view of those. Enterprise-focused vendors are going to do more than simply sink info from public sites like Facebook. They’re going to take that information and build into or out from the enterprise into those social networks and drive information from those. It’s going to become a two-way street.

You’re going to see folks like Facebook, and most notably, LinkedIn, working in the other direction themselves, and with third parties, to develop enterprise-bound social networks. Look for those to emerge next year.

And from Drupal CEO Dries Buytaert
Social publishing (blogs, forums, wikis, social networks, etc.) will become more pervasive and continue to make inroads in organizations seeking to facilitate collaboration between teams and departments. These applications, while nothing new, make many aspects of business better, are here to stay, and will mature over time.

2. Brands get promoted directly via microblogging & social networking

From The Marketing Consigliere:

Brands will use Twitter and some people will tolerate push communication.
Just as the original commercial Internet “pioneers” were eclipsed by corporate suits in regard to the continued development and exploitation of the Internet, brands will become a more dominant player in this tool. While the Innovators and Early Adopters who embraced Twitter may feel their “find” has been violated, this is just another stage in the product life cycle as the Early Majority and Late Majority get on board. Many of these later adopters will be complacent with one-way messaging, just as they have been while using other media…

As B2B buyers become less reluctant to use “consumer” apps in their daily work routine, they will accept this relatively new form of blogging as the primary means of communication with their vendors. (Personally, I doubt we will see Twitter etc. being the primary means in Europe this year, but interesting that it is taking off so fast in the US. )

3. New market entrants make fast impact using online marketing

From Joe McKendrick, also for Briefings Direct:

We are going to see folks — maybe IT people, or people who work for vendors and have been laid off — have the ability to start their own business at a very low cost of entry. On the flip side of that, the whole social-networking and cloud-computing phenomena, companies have these tools as well to employ low-cost methods to reach their markets and to interact with their customers. We’re going to see a lot more of that as well. A marketing campaign doesn’t have to cost $200,000 to reach your customers. You can use the social network, the Web 2.0 tools, to interact and collaborate and find out what’s going on in your markets at a very relatively low cost.

For large or fast-growing organisations, where collaboration and business models are constantly evolving, Web2.0 is becoming as important for its enterprise business applications as it is for the Internet ones. Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) increasingly uses Web 2.0 technologies to integrate processes (some experts suggest SOA is now superseded by Web-Oriented Architecture, but that’s probably mainly just a matter of what you call it).

Worth thinking about if you are selling to companies using SOA - and more companies are now doing so. For them, Web2.0 apps such as wikis, mashups, blogs and so on are not about window-dressing but about resource and communication efficiency, and speed of innovation and response. In the case of innovation factories and other cross-company collaboration, these tools are being increasingly located in the cloud, too.

A few of the benefits of these apps are outlined on Dion Hinchcliffe’s blog How to Survive and Thrive in Business Today with Web 2.0 - Part 1 (see image above - I’m looking forward to part 2, btw).

This is not to say that all large companies are on this track. According to  Bob Gourley’s  executivebiz blog post Web2.0 Adoption in Large Enterprises

…there are three ways to reap the benefit of Web2.0 in large enterprises:

1) Just wait and do nothing.  Eventually all people in large organizations leave, either on their feet or on their back, and as they do they will be replaced by people who probably know more about Web2.0 so these new capabilities will slowly be more widely used.

2) Encourage self learning and an individual examination of Web2.0 capabilities and use grass-roots efforts to change big organizations, or

3) Establish formal training programs, strong evangelism and executive leadership towards a vision of Web2.0.

I think you can guess which track he favours! The point I’m making is not to sell Web2.0 business tools: however, if you are trying to sell to companies who are actively using or exploring these tools, using them in your own communications doesn’t just get the message across more directly, but also shows you are on their wavelength. If you are not convinced, you can test it with a thought experiment: imagine your competitors using e-books, webinars, podcasts, mashups, wikis or whatever they can find to communicate their message to such customers, while you stick firmly to news releases, magazine articles and adverts.