SIPA Members Get in the Tweeting Swing
At a speech earlier this year, best-selling author David Meerman Scott—who will be the SIPF Awards Luncheon keynote speaker at the upcoming SIPA 2011 Conference—encouraged the packed conference hall to Tweet away while he waxed fairly rhapsodically about real-time marketing, public relations and social media
So as you watch a video of the event, scrolled across the bottom of the screen are the constant Tweets: “Think of yourself as a journalist, not a marketer and it will change the look and feel of your website.” “On the web, you ARE what you publish.” “Totally agree with @dmscott about use of stock photography instead of pics of your people. Definitely worth extra effort.” “The Grateful Dead let people record their concerts. They were viral marketing pioneers.”
With Scott to look forward to, you definitely get the feel that this SIPA Conference will be very lively and “socially” minded. A warm-up event is taking place today as I write, at the New England Chapter meeting in beautiful Cambridge, Mass., with a panel discussion titled Using Social Media to Build Your Publishing Business. The panelists include: Josh Macht, executive director, Harvard Business Review; Danny Carlat, publisher, The Carlat Report; and Mary Kay Lofurno, director, online marketing, Wellesley Information Services.
You can follow this panel discussion on Twitter with #sipane. Already, the SIPA Twitter patter is beating heavily. “Use the website for interaction, not just transaction. – Josh Macht.” “Carlat has a blog and it is important to be passionate and authentic … Hence leading to trust.” “Learning about how algorithmic changes in search engines rank tweets, retweets & FB likes. Thx Mary Kay Lofurno.” “Key point – work really hard to understand how to bring social media followers into the family and target exactly want they want.”
In his new book, “Real-Time Marketing and PR: How to Instantly Engage Your Market, Connect With Customers, and Create Products That Grow Your Business Now,” Scott has a lot to say about Twitter, mostly all good. He compliments the Obama campaign for alerting their Twitter followers BEFORE the media when Joe Biden was named as the vice presidential candidate. “Tell your fans first. Give your best deals to existing customers…This is an essential lesson in the art of real-time customer connection,” Scott writes. “The lesson here is to stop focusing on providing better service and pricing to non-customers (as mobile phone providers and magazines do) and instead favor those who favor you: your existing customers.”
He writes that marketers like Twitter because it’s easy, and audiences like it because they what and when to follow. “Your challenge in replicating these ideas is to deliver information that your buyers value as important. If you try to use Twitter to hype your offering in a way that seems sleazy or overly self-serving, you risk doing your company harm.
“So study these ideas, think about your customers’ needs, and come up with valuable information you can serve up in real time.”
At one time, it might have been considered bad manners to type away to friends and contacts while the keynote speaker is in mid-sentence. Now the keynote speaker encourages it. Times haven’t just changed, they’ve inverted. But I think what Scott writes about “valuable information” is still very important to remember. Even Tweets have to contain something of interest to the Tweetee. Give five in a row that aren’t very interesting and your follower may look to follow the next pad pounder. Keep it real-time and keep it valuable.
Remember to check #sipane on Twitter!
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Announcing a Big Event!
SIPA Webinar: (free for members!)
Managing Your Company’s Social Media
Exposures and Insurance Coverage Issues
Thursday May 19, 2011, 1 p.m.
We will look at the legal issues involved in social media, such as defamation,
copyright and trademark law, and discuss some of the insurance
concerns with these new technologies and how to protect your company.
Speakers:
Mike DiSilvestro, V.P. Claims from AXIS PRO
Christopher Beall from Levine, Sullivan, Koch & Schulz, LLP
Publisher, TBA
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