Don't do this.

A new service just getting into Beta called put.io, which is a cloud-based storage service that allows you to stream your media, has this as a splash page if you try to sign up for its closed beta. In an attempt to be Web-developer cute, it took this tone in its image: “Dear friend. You are using Internet Explorer. Please don’t do that.”

You see, this is a great way to alienate an audience. A potentially paying, engaged, promotional audience. In this case it is also alienates more than 63 percent of Internet users, myself included when I’m at work.

What may be cute in Silicon Valley is not cute in corporate America or in most households that are connected to the Internet. My initial reaction was surprise.I was surprised that somebody allowed that to go public. I was surprised that somebody didn’t do the market research. I was surprised somebody was not thinking about a business model.

Please do this

I am an admitted Mac user at home. I run Firefox and at times Safari. But at work, I am on my PC. Running Internet Explorer. Like 63.27 percent of the country.

The lesson to this is to make sure the message you are curating is one that supports your core business model. Having a corporate personality is an essential part of today’s digital media landscape. But don’t do it at the expense of potential revenue.

I know that Internet Explorer has compatibility issues with some technologies and it does not have the robust external developer ecosystem that Firefox and Chrome enjoy. But insulting the user for the choice in technology they’ve made seems asinine.

This is an instance where a solid PR counsel would have raised this issue and helped this young company along its path to success. By offering guidance around messaging, market perception and helping to craft the language used, PR could have helped this company have at least one more customer.

UPDATE: It was just pointed out to me that the percentage of people who would be looking to try this app that run IE might be quite low. Maybe this is a case of “Know your audience” and I’m just being overly sensitive.

What do you think about this messaging and tactic?

Twitter relations is similar to blogger relations, but eliminates the threshold of authority that comes with a blog. Brands, PR companies and marketing teams are beginning to provide limited access to everyday tweeters. Now, these aren’t your ordinary tweeters, these are people with at least 1,000 followers and who are generally quite vocal.

As you’ll see, I apparently fit this profile… But what I’m seeing is PR and marketing toeing the line between sponsored posts and actual brand evangelism.

Will tweet for food

Recently in the Seattle area, I saw Pemco flying across Tweetdeck. A group of local people had been invited to the top of the Space Needle and had a catered affair where Pemco debuted a new part of its “Northwest Profiles” ad campaign.

The people present had tweeted about being there and watching the commercial and hanging out with the Pemco CMO (who had “invited” his followers to attend).

Another example is an event that Alaska Airlines is sponsoring, called the Aviation Geek Night. A scant 12 people won tickets to take a ride in the airline’s flight simulator and have some further access to the company. This is not invite only and there was no expectation of tweeting on behalf of Alaska Airlines. Disclosure: I won a pass and will be attending.

Also, another invite I’ve received is to head to a location of a high-end dining chain called El Gaucho. It is opening a new location locally and is featuring a lunch menu. They hired a company to host a Taste and Tweet and local media and a few “average Joe” twitterers got to attend (again, disclaimer: I was one of them).

Are these sponsored posts? What about the media people in attendance at these events? I think those count as sponsored tweets and the media present must either disclose their receiving of free goods or food in their tweets. As a non-member of the media (anymore), I think that what I voluntarily posted to my Twitter stream also counts. But am I under a moral or legal obligation to disclose?

How to relate to Tweeters

So, is there a right way to engage with prolific tweeters? What is more important, having one person with 100,000 followers at an event or 20 people with 1,000 followers? I think the answer is pretty clear as the 20 people are more likely to be more vocal with their posts and opinions, resulting in additional mentions.

For small brands looking to boost the mentions in the Twitter stream, having a small, semi-exclusive event is a great way to do that. The problem is the discolsure dilemma. If the “average” person on Twitter is going to act as media at an event, then they should discolse the freebies. Would it have been acceptable for me to go to the El Gaucho event and not posted anything about it?

If PR and marketing companies are OK with people coming to the event and not tweeting at all, then they should not take credit for those that do. Mentions on Twitter as part of these events should not count as media mentions.

Measuring the impact

What value do these mentions have then? The word-of-mouth marketing that occurs from these is quite valuable. The mentions the above companies received helped boost their visibility and their reach. Did the events lead to more sales? Did they lead to actual press coverage? Those are some of the key metrics to consider.

What are your thoughts on this? Should PR take credit for bringing in assorted tweeters to an invite-only event? What are your best practices for tweeter relations? How do you see this trend evolving?

Do your customers and prospects trust your blogs? New research from Forrester says they don’t.

Forrester analyst Josh Bernoff recently released a report that had this interesting tidbit, amongst others:

Consumers trust company blogs less than any other channel.

This result comes from a survey wedid in Q2 of 2008. Have a look at the data yourself. Not only do blogs rank below newspapers and portals, they rank below wikis, direct mail, company
email, and message board posts. Only 16% of online consumers who read corporate blogs say they trust them. If you’re a corporate blogger or somebody who advises companies, you need to take this into account.

I’d like to know if you trust what we say here on these pages. we strive to create an open discussion on cloud computing, enterprise software and Web app distribution, amongst other topics.

Last year, Etelos was named as one of Inside CRM’s top 20 corporate blogs because we have made an effort to make sure every post is not a promotional spin piece for Etelos.

More to the story

There’s more to this story, though. In the original post, Bernoff lists other sources that people trust more than corporate blogs.

This graph is from Forrester and explains the break down in what sources people trust.

“Email from people you know” at the top is no surprise, but to see items such as wikis and yellow pages ranked higher is interesting. Most yellow pages services are sponsored listings — ads.

Quite frankly, I’m more willing to put faith in a quality, open and honest blog post than in an ad.

What I see in the general trend of trusted sources is that newer sources of energy are decidedly at the bottom of the list, while established or older relationships trend toward the top.

Earning trust

In his summary blog post, Bernoff advises that an open discourse is essential to establishing trust. Basically, what that means is that trust is earned. For a smaller company in a specialized industry such as we are, this trust is earned first in a small circle of companies.

So, how can companies earn trust? Here’s a couple of ways:

• Don’t just blog about the positives. Perfect software doesn’t exist, especially if yours is wearing a Beta tag.
• Link out, link early and link often. I feel that referring to others enhances your credibility.
• Let your content speak to your expertise. If you are truly innovative, your content will say so.
• Convers with your readers. Invite comments, respond to comments and post comments on others blogs.

So, my challenge to you is to earn some trust. Let me know what steps you’re doing to earn that trust.

Most large companies simply aren’t agile enough to actively be involved and followup on a campaign. And a lot of smaller companies simply don’t have the time to be actively participating in conversations.

Participating in a marketing campaign is about connecting with the audience. Let them into your world. Show them how things work and show them why your product is the best.

One of the best examples of participation is Wine Library TV. The point of WLTV is not to get video views or Twitter comments, it is to sell wine. The videos that are produced, the events Gary speaks at and the messages he sends on Twitter are a means to an end.

But other examples exist as well. Every party thrown is an act of participation. When Scott Beale at Laughing Squid has a drink up, the goal is to meet new people, interact with his audience and hopefully score some new business.

More traditional methods exist as well. Take the Webinar as an example. A project manager or product architect giving a personal, non-marketing tour of a product or technology goes a lot further with an engaged audience than a banner ad on Digg.

So, participate with your audience. It’s not about being seen, it’s about seeing and connecting with the audience.

These are the foundations of an effective marketing campaign and will help any brand, any PR pro or any marketer work better with their clients and potential customers. So, spread the CRAP and let me know what you think.

Communicate

Photo from Flickr user kool_skatkat under Creative Commons.

This is a pretty obvious practice and should be standard operating procedure. Communicating means not just broadcasting, but responding and conversing with your audience as well. Most organizations fall short in a couple of key areas.

Openness is essential. The Beta’s delayed? Say so. There’s a bug? Fix it, apologize and move on to new features. There is a limit to how open you want to be, but I feel that in order for a company to succeed, it needs to be as open as responsibly possible.

Brevity is a key. I have invented a word: conciseification (ironic, no?), which means “take what you said in 500 words and say it in 200. Take your four sentences and make them two. By tightening your message, it becomes more memorable. The recipient can take the message away much easier.

Listening makes you a good spouse. By actively listening and conversing with your audience, they feel respected, empowered and happy. A happy audience is one of the most effective marketing tools possible.

Relate

Relating to your potential market is absolutely essential. Don’t just go to the trade show, take it over. Be a presence anywhere your potential customer base is at. This does not need to be huge parties, expensive sponsorships or even in-depth webinars.

A simple hello or a simple appearance at a meetup is enough. People will remember the brand or the business that goes the extra step to go to a Barcamp or to go to a PHP Meetup. Your competition isn’t doing it, so you should be.

Anticipate

This is probably the hardest premise to follow. In the tech business, people the customers generally get what they want. How can you as a marketer anticipate what the customer wants? Easy: Follow the other three elements of this post.

By communicating, relating and participating, you become an expert. You can identify trends and you can jump ahead of the mob to deliver the solution it is running toward.

Participate

I thought about just retyping the word “participate.” But I realized there’s a lot more to participation than being present. You’re participating because you have a goal: to succeed. But if you are genuinely passionate about the product or brand you are representing, then it will show.

Photo from Flickr user matiasjajaja under Creative Commons.

These concepts make for an effective cornerstone for a product launch, a new campaign or simply reconnecting with your audience. Step in this CRAP and the only thing you’ll smell is success. What do you think?

Now, I know this isn’t a unique post and I know my ideas are shared by many, but I felt like this would be a good introductory topic to this place and The Geek Giant.

Let’s look at this Press Release from Bungee Labs:

Bungee Labs ™ today announced federated hosting to expand adoption of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) among enterprises and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers. Organizations developing highly interactive applications on the Bungee Connect ™ PaaS can now elect to host those applications on self-managed infrastructure running the new Bungee Application Server ™, or on the multi-tenant Bungee Grid ™ at datacenters in the United States, Europe, and on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2).

Umm, huh? Let’s try a simple exercise in MarCom translation:

Bungee Labs announced that you can host your apps on their servers.

Seems simple enough. For naïve businesses and developers, this is great. Simply code your app in whatever language Bungee supports and they’ll host it for you.

Moving beyond words

One of my issues with public relations, marketing, social marketing, social media or whatever the buzz word du jour is, is that it’s so much more effective to just convey your message with plain and simple words.

Try this exercise the next time you’re thinking about drafting a press release or blog post: Take what you’ve written and re-write it using half the words. It sounds difficult, but it’s not, I promise.